Recovery Glitch with Hidden Pages

Report · Oct 10, 2025

I've encountered kind of a weird glitch with the new "hidden pages" feature. So here's what happened:

InDesign crashed, taking edits on 3 or 4 documents with it. Ok, whatever, I've been riding the InDesign dragon for well over a decade at this point. I'll restart InDesign and recover what I can and re-do what I have to.

Except I get an error that says "All pages can't be hidden." Weird--I didn't hide any pages. I don't even use that feature! But fine, I'll click "Unhide pages."

InDesign crashes. No amount of restarting or cache clearing fixes this, and I must abandon any hope of recovering my documents.

Has anyone else encountered this?

Report · Oct 14, 2025

Hi ZJ,

Did you attempt to export the document to IDML and then after that, re-open the IDML file and save-as to a new INDD file? Maybe the fault will go away?

Mike Witherell

Report · Oct 15, 2025

Hi Mike,

When this glitch occures I can't even use InDesign unless I abandon the recovery process. So there's no way to export to an IDML unless I re-save the orginal document after purging all recovery information, which just doesn't make sense. I have had this glitch happen several times to a variety of files, from new to old, from 2 pages to 20.

It's not a consistent glitch--sometimes it happens, and sometimes it doesn't. It only occures after InDesign has already crashed. So it's like a double-glitch. First InDesign crashes--probably due to network connectivty or some other linking nonsense--and then documents that I've never hidden any pages on get this error that all pages are hidden and can't be unhidden. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Just wondering if there's something funky going on with my system or if InDesign is doing this to anyone else.

Report · Oct 14, 2025

Hi @Zebra Jamie,

Thanks for sharing the details, and I'm really sorry to hear about this. To add to the expert's suggestion, could you please confirm the version of InDesign and your operating system details? If possible, try creating a new test document and checking if the same error appears when using hidden pages. This will help us see if the issue is file-specific or affects all documents.

Also, did you happen to see the Adobe crash reporter when the crash occurred? If yes, please submit the crash report and share the email address used while submitting via DM, so I can review the logs. I wasn't able to locate any crash reports under your community email. Ref: https://adobe.ly/4onf9Kv

If the affected file still won't open, please share it privately(DM) through a cloud link (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.) so I can test it further and check with the team.

Looking forward to your update.

Abhishek

Report · Oct 15, 2025

I'm using the most up-to-date version of InDesign on a up-to-date Windows 10 PC.

I can't replicte the error as it only happens after InDesign has already crashed and I try to recover documents. No crash reporter shows up, either in the initial crash or in the can't-unhide-pages crash. (I always try to report every crash. Sometimes I write little stories about the workflow before the crash in the hopes a burt-out tech support associate can get a little bit of a smile. :P)

The original files will open, but the recovery files seem to be corrupted by something in the "hide pages" feature.

As a 10+ year veteran of using InDesign, I'm saving every 20 minutes anyway, but it's very perplexing and derails my workflow when it happens.

Report · Oct 16, 2025

Ok, I wasn't able to catch the original crash BUT I was able to get the error message and subsiquent crashes that happened by using the "unhide" option on video. I've sped it up by 500% and took out the audio since I figured no one wanted to hear me typing. But I tried to "recover" the files, even deferring recovery to see if it was just the rebooting of InDesign that was kicking up the errors. Didn't work. Still lost progress with no clear trigger for the original crash. (But maybe you can find the crash reports now?)