Problems making a PDF from Indesign CS5

[Teddy_Boi_Toronto]

Hi friends. I have recently switched to CS5 and I find that I usually need to close the program and then reopen it before I can make a PDF. It says it is working in the background but all it does is spin without creating the PDF. Anyone else having this problem? 

TED

[moe_design]

We just purchased a new imac in order to upgrade to CS5.

I am experiencing the same problem that everyone is describing. The ability to export PDFs from InDesign is a critical part of our workflow as this is the way we show proofs to our clients for approvals. Without it we are dead in the water.

Thanks to everyone who suggested work arounds. I tried the export to interactive and so far that is working, but it does create a color shift in what we show our clients, so at best, this is only a temporary solution.

Adobe--please fix this fast!

[wilbyers2]

What did you find???? I want to solve my problem with CS5 too!

Sincerely,

Wil Byers

3448 Eastlake Dr.

W. Richland, WA 99353

Cell: 509-947-0640

[LuxMaji]

We found that when we removed the guides from the all master pages we were using on our documents it would export to PDF without crashing. We have not had any more issues since that change.

Why this is happening is beyond me, but it seems to be an oil and water thing with some graphical elements brought in.

Obviously this might not be the case for you, but give it a go. I hope it helps you like it did us.

L

[Peter Spier]

Thanks for your change of heart. I really hope it helps some people.

[LuxMaji]

Your kindness is contagious.

L

[Peter Spier]

LuxMaji wrote:

Your kindness is contagious.

L

Better that than some other stuff I've got...

[DeanB]

Can people confirm whether:

A. They are experiencing a "hang" of the PDF creation process or an unexpected quit of InDesign CS5 during that process

B. The situation applies to every document or only certain documents?

I am experiencing chronic unexpected quits of InDesign CS5 from specific documents.

[Peter Spier]

@ DeanB,

In my case it's been the export process hanging, and an inability to end it without forcing the application to close. Happens on some files, but I've always managed to get them to work on a re-try by changing my strategy.

[designerBeans]

Ditto

P Spier wrote:

@ DeanB,

In my case it's been the export process hanging, and an inability to end it without forcing the application to close. Happens on some files, but I've always managed to get them to work on a re-try by changing my strategy.

What he said ^

[LuxMaji]

A. It causes an unexpected quit of CS5 (40 times on Sunday)

B. Not every document. If you start bringing (linking) elements into the new document from legacy versions, psds, tables, .ai, tiff, pdfs.problems seem to start occurring. If it is a virgin CS5 doc with nothing that has been touched by the past... things seem ok.

What I did was started removing elements from the document one at a time. Each time, save and export to PDF. There will come a point when it does not crash. When that happens I obviously make note of what is the problem element.That lead me to some tables that were in our files.

I then took that weekend info to my group and we all divided and concurred. We discovered that when we created a new master page, copied the contents to that page/s without the guides, we could export with no problem. We did this without touching the suspect files that we felt were originally causing the crashes. Odd I know. If we took the suspect files out and placed them in a new document they would export fine. Everything was pointing to our master pages and the guides that were on them.

L

[DeanB]

LuxMaji:

I did start to divide up the document (My plan was to try PDF of groups of pages in the following  sequence 1-10, 11-20, 1-20, 21-30, 1-30, 31-40, etc.) Unfortunately, I got through 1-30 successfully but then InDesign CS5 crashed before the file naming/saving dialog came up so I could try 31-40. I feel like there is more instability than just a "bad" item on a page.

After, re-launching and recovering I was able to successful continue (31-40, 1-40) but InDesign again crashed, this time after entering the PDF filename but before the PDF dialog.

I decided to watch memory usage and with that single document open InDesign CS5 is using about 785MB, during the creation of the 1-40 PDF it went up to 1.8GB. After successfully creating the PDF it drops back to 1.2GB.

The other common problem that seems to be going hand-in hand with this issue is InDesign CS5 will often crash after switching to another application and then returning to IDCS5. In fact, I was writing this and decided to return to IDCS5 after creating a larger 1-50 PDF so I could see if the memory usage ballooned further but INCS5 crashed immediately upon switching.

I am getting two different error patterns:

One when it crashes during PDF creation:

Thread 0 Crashed:  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

0   ???                           0xa0515650 _XHNDL_trapback_instruction + 0

1   PublicLib.dylib               0x0117062b CmdUtils::ProcessCommand(ICommand*) + 59

2   com.adobe.InDesign.PDF        0x321beed6 GetPlugIn + 95558

3   com.adobe.InDesign.PDF        0x321c3897 GetPlugIn + 114439

4   com.adobe.InDesign.PDF        0x321bda08 GetPlugIn + 90232

5   ...e.InDesign.Import Export UI 0x31545845 GetPlugIn + 17029

6   ...e.InDesign.Import Export UI 0x3154666f GetPlugIn + 20655

7   com.adobe.InDesign.PDF UI     0x2cc7f209 GetPlugIn + 164969

8   ...Design.Generic Style Editor 0x2cad5af1 GetPlugIn + 18801

The second on the switch back to IDCS5:

Thread 0 Crashed:  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

0   ???                           0xa0515650 _XHNDL_trapback_instruction + 0

1   PublicLib.dylib               0x0117062b CmdUtils::ProcessCommand(ICommand*) + 59

2   com.adobe.InDesign.Layout UI  0x318e96a8 0x318e1000 + 34472

3   WidgetBinLib.dylib            0x02812337 PanelView::WindowActivated() + 119

4   com.adobe.InDesign.Layout UI  0x318f43af 0x318e1000 + 78767

5   WidgetBinLib.dylib            0x02812337 PanelView::WindowActivated() + 119

6   WidgetBinLib.dylib            0x02812337 PanelView::WindowActivated() + 119

7   WidgetBinLib.dylib            0x02812337 PanelView::WindowActivated() + 119

8   ...obe.InDesign.Application UI 0x2f284ff4 GetPlugIn + 556084

9   com.apple.HIToolbox           0x9880ef2f DispatchEventToHandlers(EventTargetRec*, OpaqueEventRef*, HandlerCallRec*) + 1567

10  com.apple.HIToolbox           0x9880e1f6 SendEventToEventTargetInternal(OpaqueEventRef*, OpaqueEventTargetRef*, HandlerCallRec*) + 411

11  com.apple.HIToolbox           0x9880e055 SendEventToEventTargetWithOptions + 58

[LuxMaji]

Were you displaying the document in typical or high?

Sent from my iPad

[LuxMaji]

The reason I ask is that if you attempt to view the "suspect" pages in high quality, CS5 will crash. This leads me to think it is in the rendering process.

Sent from my iPad

[Eugene Tyson]

I demand that everyon that I've helped pay me $40. OR Adobe give me $8,000 for solving peoples problems on the forum.

(Bob is owed somewhere in the region of $20,000)

Please pay up or (I can't speak for Bob) but I will not help anyone anymore.

Listen up Adobe, you're not getting MY free time and service ANY more.

Raaawwwrrrr (hear me roar)

(even though 90% of the help I dish out is freely available on the LiveDoc helpfiles)

[Peter Spier]

OK, folks, let's please give Lux Maji a break here. He's seen the light and shared his solutuion. No need to drag the around anymore.

Please keep further comments focused on the topic and what works, or doesn't.

[Eugene Tyson]

Sorry Peter, I didn't realise there was a second page - I see that the "solution" was posted. Most other forums I visit bring you the last post made in the thread.

(evidently I seem to have linked to a post on the second page? I left midway through posting to get cake, forgot where I was.)

[DeanB]

LuxMaji,

The problem seems that it's going to be very difficult to pin down the right element or page if I can't get it to crash at the same point.

I have not specifically viewed every page on high-quality but during deadline I did view many of the pages in high-quality and was frequently turning it "on and off" and did not notice an instance where that caused a crash.

Dean

[Eugene Tyson]

This has been a good tool in tracking down problems for me

http://indesignsecrets.com/page-exporter-utility-peu-5-script-updated-for-cs3.php

It can export pages of the InDesign document as separate files.

I just tried it in CS5 and it works fine.

[DeanB]

Eugene,

Great link, thank you. I hadn't found that one.

Interestingly, the PDF creation process still fails at some point for me using it.

Regardless, I'll definitely be keeping the script around for future use.

[Eugene Tyson]

At what point does it fail?

If it's right at the beginning then I'd look on the master page for something causing it, or a bad style (character, paragraph, table, object etc.)

[designerBeans]

Eugene,

Mine fails at the very beginning. However, when I worked with those same files in CS4 I had not problem with failure. Why would CS5 have problems with a character, paragraph, table, object etc. when CS4 didn't? Just trying to find the logic.

Gail

[Eugene Tyson]

I don't know the internals of InDesign, so I can't answer that question. They do tweak different "engines" in the program every release. I do know that they update the text "engines" with new ones, as it's always said that text can reflow from version to version.

Where something worked fine in CS4, it could be that it shouldn't have worked fine in CS4, but CS5 doesn't have this little bug that CS4 had but was never discovered. OR perhaps CS5 has the bug that it can't replicate something that is should be able to do.

There's endless possibilities. One thing that crashed my files recently was the auto pagination from when placing text - and only happened when I had Span Columns headings in the text - is it a bug? Maybe? Maybe my computer isn't sophisticated enough to handle the calculations that InDesign needs to do.

I've always had the divide and conquer methodology from when I started way back in 2001.

If it's failing off the bat, then try doing half the book, then try the other half. So a 300 page book - I'd try exporing 1-150, and then 151 - 300. If neither work, then try 1 - 75, 76 - 150 etc. and keep going.

If you find this isn't working then you have to try another approach.

Recently I had to export the text as RTF and insert it to a new document. When I tried to export to PDF it still crashed. So I new it was a style in the text causing havoc. I systematically broke the link to the styles until I found the culprit.

(although prior to this I had take the master pages to new documents, the graphics, the guides, the swatches, and whatever else I could think of to narrow down the problem).

I've had pdfs before that wouldn't PDF. And I was able to export it in chunks, recombine it in Acrobat and send to print where it had no further issues. (I don't think I ever figured out what went wrong.

I don't think  I've ever had a PDF that would not export from InDesign (from CS2 to Cs5) that was an issue to do with InDesign PDF creation, but rather with some form of corruption that crept into the file at some point. But as I got better with InDesign I thought myself to not repurpose files, don't keep doing Saves, and do a save as from time to time. Use the export functions to fix files behaving weirldy and umpteen other little things to make life easier when working with InDesign.

[MatthewLaun]

@Eugene,

You're using what I call a binary isolation method. It's instrumental in testing and troubleshooting complex systems, especially with large data sets like an InDesign document (which is in fact a database). I've got a brief explanation and use case at the bottom of this document:

http://go.adobe.com/kb/ts_kb405153_en-us

[Eugene Tyson]

Excellent. It's a true and tested method of troubleshooting. I've been doing it since Ventura and Quark days.

[LuxMaji]

Am I the only one that feels it is sad that you (and others) are placed in a position to have to create such a system? I do think Adobe owes you, and wish you felt the same.

Sent from my iPad