Publish Online | Extremely slow | InDesign 17.4

[StudioFerz]

Hi, since a couple of days loading of our published documents is extremely slow. Has anybody else experienced this and, if so, is this an Adobe server issue? Maintenance? Docs that were previously loading in a sec now take almost ten to half a minute to load... Fingers crossed this is temporarily and quickly resolved.

{Renamed By MOD}

[Nigey-LTA]

Clients aren't pissed off, but this needs sorting. Shouldn't you be urging adobe to sort this problem, not gloating?

[jay_designuk]

Agree, it was commercially viable, now it is not.

I'm not interested in IN5, the document we created wasn't built for IN5, if it were we'd be using IN5.

If the functionality is in the software I expect to work, we aren't using £5 crayons and paper here!

[qwfqwf]

Yes totally agree with all of you.

I was first told by one of the 'experts' that this was a free service (lol), then I was told that I'd be a subscriber irrespective of whether it worked (lol), that I was foolish to rely on a cloud service I'm paying for and that, yes, you've guessed it, that I should try IN5. 

I have not tried IN5 but I've seen a lot of mixed feedback, for me based on what I understand the functionality to be, it does not appear to justify the subscripton price that they are asking. 

I agree none of us are playing games here, I've been working in hard-nosed design industries for 20+ years at this point, I've pitched literally tens of millions of dollars of projects to some of the biggest enterprises on earth, it's really annoying having 'forum experts' who may not have worked professionally for decades in some cases telling us how grateful we should be we are to have them comment in order to tell us that we should basically shut up and stop complaining.

It is gaslighting, that's literally what it is.

[Nigey-LTA]

Yup, you’re right, they’re unpaid employees - sort of

And as I keep saying, if it wasn’t for Publish Online, would terminate
sAdobe subscription for sure!

[BobLevine]

Oh, for the love of god! Who's told you to shut up and stop complaining? Certainly not me and most of the other comments have simply pointed out alternatives that you should be exploring. You have no clue what gaslighting means if this is the way you're using it.

20+ years? Congratulations, rookie!

[Nigey-LTA]

Listed, last thing I got time for is bitchin, just want issue sorted - this
is all really Kafkaesque innit

[Nigey-LTA]

Hi Jay,
Just had Rahnl at Adobe phone me, said are working on issue, but they keep
going on about Indesign release issue, keep telling them it has to be their
Publish Online server setup. Like talking to a brick wall!!!!

[jay_designuk]

Hopefully, it's gathering some pace now though!

Crazy situation to be in.

[qwfqwf]

That's definitely not encouraging lol.

Thanks for trying : )

[nickb41910191]

You'd have to have almost no understanding of how technology works to assume this is anything but a server issue. Reassuring!

[Nigey-LTA]

Agree totally, speed issue occured at exactly same time as I also noticed could no longer save publish online to iphone home screen. It's another of Adobe's changes that they've made without consultation. Also suffered 2 other changes to PO interface previously that cost me a whole load of time.

[Nigey-LTA]

Hi there,

I've been experiencing the slow loading now for over 40 days, lost count of times spoken to Adobe - think support just don't pass on anything to engineering team. Keep nagging if you can

[jay_designuk]

I too am having exactly the same issues as reported. Slow loading of pages and video is buffering terribly. We've even gone through all the videos in the document and optimised them (largest is 8mb, smallest is 769kb) and although it's improved buffering, it still does it. Never had this issue before - whats the score please @Rishabh_Tiwari ?

[Rishabh_Tiwari]

Hi @jay_designuk ,

The bug is still open, and I am keeping track of it, so please bear with me. I will update the bug as soon as I hear from the team or if I need any information required to triage this issue. 

Regards

Rishabh

[Nigey-LTA]

I suspect a change made to Publish Online server setup has caused this
issue. Also, now uploading from Indesign is really slow Rishab

[Rishabh_Tiwari]

Thanks for sharing the details, @Nigey-LTA I will update this information on the bug.

[qwfqwf]

Hi Rishabh,

How long does it typically take for engineering requests get a response?

Should we therefore be expecting to wait hours, days etc?

Thanks!

[jay_designuk]

Depends on what it says in their SLA (which I've asked for!). Then they need beating over the head with it!

[jay_designuk]

Tell that to a client of mine that's chomping at the bit for the job they've commissioned. I (and others) want it sorted asap please! Can you also please point me in the direction of your 'service level agreement' for this service please?

[Fletcher98A4]

I also have a furious client who has a pitch for a massive project due in a few hours.

Right now some slides of the presentation are not loading at all...

I've experienced the slow load times for a couple of separate projects now and, although I explain the technical difficulty to clients, I can't justify paying for InDesign anymore.

Please give us some more detailed information

[Nigey-LTA]

Hi there,

Sorry to hear of your problems, I’ve been on at Adobe now for over 40 days
to no avail. They really have a weird attitude, think if just one person
moans at them, they ignore it totally.

Just keep nagging them, we might actually get somewhere

Nigel

[rayek.elfin]

To set the record straight: I completely agree that Adobe should fix these issues ASAP. It is part of InDesign's feature set, and was advertized with loud hoompapa when it was first introduced by Adobe.

Yet the realist in myself has been disappointed by Adobe (and other vendors) too many times. Remember Digital Publishing Suite? The single edition? It was pretty neat. Users loved it, and built it into their business offerings - as did I. Then Adobe decided to go "big" and discontinue the service.

My hands have been burnt too many times in the past to trust third-party server/cloud services like Publish Online. As it stands, I have a feeling someone at Adobe management decided to cap download speeds for certain media assets on the servers used for Publish Online to save on bandwidth costs. This is merely a guess, though. But experience with setting up web servers myself tells me that this is not merely an unfortunate mishap. It worked very fast before. Out of the blue the download speed stutters. An accident? I think not.

In any case, I love InDesign. I like the interactive feature set, although it is much too limited for me personally. The programmer who originally created the epub interactive FXL feature set seems to have left years and years ago, and since it was first introduced in InDesign, nothing much, if anything, new was added. A great potential lost in my opinion. I suppose a true html5 export option steps on too many (cloud strategy and marketing) toes. Together with Adobe's history on canceling or limiting these type of "free server-based" publishing options, I switched to another (open source) option (which is not very accessible to the average designer, btw).

(I did indeed try In5, but it is still (far) too limited for what I do with truly interactive publication/presentation/demo work. I design in InDesign because of its superior typographical capabilities, and then convert.)

That said, I continue to hope that the InDesign team and its management comes to its senses and allows its users to export a nice working interactive html5 project with a built-in page viewer similar to the online publishing one. And that the interactive feature set is updated and expanded, and creates cleaner code.

I do not expect this to happen in our lifetimes, to be honest. Capitalism, in this case, is why we cannot have nice things that actually work the way we wish.

Now, not all is lost. The free FXL html export plugin does export a fully functional version of your interactive InDesign document pages. The only drawback is that it requires a bit of html and css knowledge to prettify the presentation somewhat and allow it to box-scale in a browser. But it lacks a nice page browser framework, of course - if you want one, that means manually coding one.

[Nigey-LTA]

Many thanks RE,
Entirely agree with everything you say, particularly about a deliberate
throttling back of server to save costs. Personally, if they charged a
little extra for cloud storage, wouldn’t be a deal-breaker. As yourself, I
absolutely love the whole way Indesign works in terms of creating digital
output. It’s pretty much my dream software. Critically, it allows me to tap
into my old clients, and also a new clientbase after pulling the plug on my
magazine businesses during Covid.

Just wish Abode would take Publish Online seriously, they certainly have no
competition with regard to Publish Online - but we need the speed back. I
really wonder if the Adobe guys up top even understand their own products?

Nigel-_LTA

[a diana]

Hey everybody!

Anyone having trouble viewing documents posted online? In InDesign Dashboard. Since last week my links (old and new) take a LONG time to load and some don't even open...

Thanks!

[BobLevine]

Have a look through the forum. Lots of issues being discussed and Adobe is aware of them. When they'll get fixed is anyone's guess.