Is there a program that can view .indd files?

[NelsonNTS]

Besides inDesign or inCopy, I mean.  I'm aware that there are programs that will extract the preview thumbnails from the file, but are there any that will view the .indd file itself?  My manager doesn't want to spend the money on a copy of inCopy for all of our users, but wants to give people the option to view .indd files currently in progress.

[Eugene Tyson]

I haven't tested it extensively.

[Laubender]

Hm…

I'm not sure now after I tried a few other things to get my preview of InDesign documents back.

Could it be that I get no preview of documents after trying to view a preview of a document where no internal previews are stored at all? Could that be the real issue?

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )

[Laubender]

Well, now I can see evidence for that bug with Preview.

Tried the following thing:

Started InDesign 2023 and the Open document dialog to open an InDesign file.

Also here we have the ability to see the preview for pages like in this case:

Now I moved up to the file of a document where no preview images of pages are stored inside. No surprise, I cannot see a preview of pages:

But here comes the bug. When I now get back to the document where before I've seen the preview of pages, now the Windows File Explorer is not able to show any previews:

The message in the field to show the preview states:

"Für diese Datei kann keine Vorschau angezeigt werden."

"Cannot show preview for this file."

So to make the Preview feature work as intended you must not try to get a preview of an InDesign document that has no previews of pages stored inside.

All of my tests done on Windows 10 with the German InDesign 2023 and the German InDesign CS6.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )