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paulf40782745
Inspiring
October 9, 2023
Answered

Indesign page thumbnails showing blank

  • October 9, 2023
  • 3 replies
  • 3598 views

Hiya, This has been ongoing for a few weeks. My page thumbnails in Indesign are not showing, they are just blank. I've got massive documents that I'm working with and I can't navigate them because of my blank page thumbnails. Any work arounds? I'm on a Mac Studio Max M, running version 18.5

Correct answer paulf40782745

Yes I did. Thanks for helping. I've just found what was wrong. I had two versions of the same font open and it was causing the issue (I'd been ignoring it for a few weeks). Once I had deactivated one of the font types all my thumbnails switched back on. Everything is sorted. 

3 replies

Zen Creative Agency
Known Participant
December 14, 2024

Man, I am so sick and tired of having all these new glitches / bugs appearing with every single release of InDesign... we don't need these headaches Adobe – can't you get anything right? What's going on with your developers, they lack simple attention-to-detail and keep breaking stuff! Been going on for years now, and am completely over it!

Frans van der Vleuten
Known Participant
June 17, 2025

I 100% feel this! 

Community Expert
June 17, 2025

You already opened a thread a here - no need to drag up an old one 

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/indesign-page-thumbnails-are-blank/td-p/15373395

 

I'm closing this one as it's several months old with no new info.

Participant
December 7, 2024

I had the same issue for weeks, it's very disturbing, it's making my work a lot harder to not have thumbnails in the pages. Today I solved the issue. I had the blue circle circling at the right top of my Indisign, signing that something is downloading, but nothing happened. If you click on it, you can see the background tasks, and it showed that the InDesign is trying to download an Adobe font. The strange thing that it's a variable font, and it couldn't download other weights of the same font, although I could actually use them in my file. The only solution was to delete all the text with the 'missing' font (or change the font to another one) close the InDesign (and probably all the Adobe programs), and reopen the file, and since there was no 'missing' font, all the thumbnails were loaded again. You have to close the InDesign for it to work, because even if you delete all the text from your document, and nothing is wrong with the other open InDesign files, it's still trying to dowload the 'missing' font, and it somehow stops all thumbnails to appear in the Pages view.

madtriumph
Participant
April 9, 2025

I had the same problem and this fixed it. Thanks!

BobLevine
Community Expert
Community Expert
October 9, 2023

Open the pages panel menu and click on panel options. Do you have thumbnails enabled?

paulf40782745
paulf40782745AuthorCorrect answer
Inspiring
October 9, 2023

Yes I did. Thanks for helping. I've just found what was wrong. I had two versions of the same font open and it was causing the issue (I'd been ignoring it for a few weeks). Once I had deactivated one of the font types all my thumbnails switched back on. Everything is sorted. 

Participant
November 19, 2023

where do you find that you had 2 of the same fonts?