InDesign Performance, Span Columns, Span Footnotes, Balance Columns, Justified Text

There are many things that affect InDesign performance. The underlying hardware including CPU, GPU, and amount of RAM (including GPU RAM) and the screen resolution are all major influences.

But there are many things that InDesign can do that maybe you shouldn't do unless you want it to slow to a crawl. While there might be some optimization the coders can do, these features just increase the workload on the CPU so much that it's hard to edit anything, at least on a long (20-30+ page) document.

My solution is to turn these things off until it's time to finalize the document. I'm making a list of those things for myself, but thought I would post them here for others to see, and on which to comment. They are:

Span Columns

Span Footnotes

Justified Text

Balance Columns

Taking them in reverse order, Balance columns makes a big hit on performance. and full-justified text slows down performance a bit. Span footnotes and span columns also make a big hit on performance. Turn them all on, and even on a fast machine with lots of RAM, editing is almost impossible.

My solution: make up a document with changes to these things to make it easier to edit, and that I then need to put back in at the end. You can turn off Balance Columns by editing Text Box properties on your master pages. You can tweak all the others by appropriate Paragraph Style changes. You can reverse these once you're done editing, though things move around and you might have to do a bit more (very, very slow) editing.

I think the only solution will be faster machines, with maybe a bit of help from code optimization. It's simply math, the more calculations you have to make that are dependent on other things, the longer it takes for the CPU to figure things out.