It has almost been a year (Sep-Oct 2023) since I ran into trouble updating my ID document. ID started to misbehave: it would go to 100% CPU with spinning disk cursor and it would never come out. Once I let it run for ages, and at some point it ran out of resources and crashed. From that moment on, I was trying to find out what was wrong, I tried a lot (older versions of ID, starting from the IDML, removing caches, different fonts, etc.), you name it, I tried it. Hanging happened at various moments, but at one point I found a reliable way to trigger it with a certain paragraph edit action at a specific point.
The document is a very large and complex document. It is about 240 Letter sized mostly two-column pages with 340 diagrams (sometimes inline, sometimes floating), index, references, etc., the works. I started the document in 2011-2012 and roughly once every three years I updated it (using the latest version of ID). You can find about it here: https://ea.rna.nl/mastering-archimate-edition-3-1/ (the last version produced in 2021, the first 50 pages are a free download)
I contacted Adobe. My document was checked by Adobe and judged to be 'not corrupted'. The issue was passed on to Adobe Engineering and they confirmed to me that it was an actual ID bug. It is apparently only triggered extremely rarely (only my document is a known trigger as far as I know), but it is a real bug (of course, going into some resource-wasting endless loop is a bug by definition, but you can allow for corrupted data to trigger such behaviour — my document is not corrupted though). It had the case number E-001071727.
Since then, I have been in the situation where I have been told various times that the bug would be fixed in an upcoming version, the first time on 1 December 2023 that "This issue will be planned to be fixed in version 19.2 of InDesign". That became 19.3 or 19.4. Every time I did not hear anything, except for instance when I asked, I was asked the same things by the same person (like: "do you have a small document that triggers it?" for which the answer is obviously no). The 'funniest' was on 6 Aug 2024 when I was told: "This issue will be resolved in the 19.5 version of InDesign, but its ETA is not fixed yet, so once that is informed, I will let you know.". I replied: "19.5 is out since 12 July 2024" (almost a month before). They replied: "This has been moved to be fixed in InDesign version 20.0, which will be released at the end of August or the first week of September" (that reply also contained the same thing from May: "Engineering has asked for the below detail- Can you help with a smaller document to look into this issue?"...). This made it clear that (a) engineering did not really look deep into it and thus (b) 'to be fixed in 20.0 which arrives late August/begin September' cannot be true.
I seem to be communicating with someone who is telling my what I like to hear, not necessarily what is true. It may also be that they are not correctly informed by the actual engineers. The last message said "As per the engineering team this issue is now with the PDF team as the issue is also with the annotations in PDF on which they need sometime more to work. Please allow me another few days to come back to you with their findings.". That was 5 days ago. This last thing is so specific that it might mean they have actually looked into it, but by now, I have trouble believing anything that I am told.
In the meantime, I have let my CC subscription expire (no use paying for it if this is why I have it in the first place).
So, after 10 months, this message is a desperate attempt to get traction (and truth). There is a deep and nasty bug which can hit anyone (as it is a bug with unknown triggers) but might be so rare that it almost never does. But if it does, you are done for. End of your document, start fully over (and potentially run into it again, so a lot of work with a risk it won't do you any good).
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