single character in text box crashes InDesign

[fricmark]

InDesign 2021, Big Sur 11.4, Font Explorer Pro 7.2.6

I have a text box that contains a single character (the letter "a"). When I try to change the character, delete it, or delete the text box that contains it, InDesign flat out crashes, disappears. I can reopen the document to it's last saved state with no problems and re-save and continue working. It's a 60-page magazine so re-doing it in a new document is not an option. I can live with the text box stayting there forever but it's bugging me.

There used to be a paragraph in there but I narrowed the problem down to this one character.

Any advice?

[J E L]

It's a stand-alone text box that isn't linked to anything, and you can move the box around on the page or off the board, but you can't delete it without crashing ID? And can you select it directly in the layers panel?

[fricmark]

Yup. Exactly.

[fricmark]

It's just that one character. I deleted the characters preceding it one-by-one, and backspaced the characters after it one-by-one to narrow it down.

[fricmark]

I can change the font to anything but if I switch it to uppercase, crashola.

[J E L · Accepted solution]

Bizarre, lol. Have you tried to resave the document (save as a copy)? Save as an IDML? Exit all the way out of InDesign and Creative Cloud?

[fricmark]

Yup. Shut down. Unplugged. etc. no go.

[fricmark]

OH MY GOD. We have a winner!! I tried your idea of saving as an IDML file. It bloody worked. So happy. Thank you so much

[Kim Hi]

I'm having a similar problem.

A text with footnotes where the footnote numbering have somehow become corrupted. If I delete either any part of the text that contains a footnote number (or a text box with one or a page containing a text box with one, or any part of the text, boxes or pages containing the footnotes themselves) InDesign crashes.

I tried updating from InDesign 2021 ver. 16.1 to 16.2.1 and I tried saving it as an IDML file and opening it both in InDesign 2020 and 2021. It crashes every time. I can change the text, make it invisible for instance by making it white, or make it any size I want, move it off the pasteboard and so on and so on. But I cannot delete it. Or I can delete it, but then InDesign crashes and when I open the file again, text is still there.

I have no idea what to do. This is concerning 12 pages of a 340-page publication that is due tomorrow.

[fricmark]

Have you tried changing the footnote options in some way? Making them endnotes perhaps? Changing the formatting?

[Migintosh]

What if you create a new page, move everything but the offending text frame to the new page and then delete the bad page?

[fricmark]

Tried it. Tried adding a linked frame moving the character to the new frame, deleting the old one then deleting teh one with the character in it. Nothing. It's completely crazy 🙂

[hiMyNameWasBob1]

Couldn't delete a text box on my TOC page without crashing. I saved the document out as a idml and closed Indesign, reopened the file, deleted the text box and saved as a indd file, no further issue.