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.

[Pro23661859a338]

I have exactly the same problem. 

I was able to isolate the caracter causing the crash but impossible to delete it, to delete the text block or to delete the page where the text block is located.

The solution to export to an idml file doesn't work for me because the process of exportation is blocked at 70%.

Any advice?

[Peter Spier]

Can you copy all of the content except the offending frame to a new document?

[Pro23661859a338]

Yes, this is possible. I was able to copy all the content except the offending frame into a new doc.

But I noticed some differences after the copy (modified styles,...). Unfortunately, the copied content is not the same as the original.

As I don't want to have to check and edit the layout of my whole 72-page document again..., I think I'll copy all the content of the offending frame - except for the character that crashes - into a new frame in the same document. Then I'll isolate the offending frame with the crashing character and make it invisible for printing.

Aware that this is not a very clean solution, I hope that the rest of the document will not have any further problems.

What do you think? 

[Peter Spier]

If styles are changing it's likely that you've based at least some of them on [Basic Paragraph] and that definition was edited in the old file. This is the main reason most of the experienced users here recommend against ever using or basing anything on [Basic Paragraph].

You should be able to fix any style definition problems by clicking the flyout menu in either the Paragraph Styles or Character Styles panel and choosing Load All Text Styles..., choose the old doc as the source, and check the box to use incoming styles in case of conflict.

You will be far better off working with a new doc than one that has already shown corruption.

[Meriel - Cydweli UK · Accepted solution]

Thanks for this solution - I had a similar problem (2025 - InDD 19.5.2.x64 - can't upgrade as I have an older PC) and struggled until I found this thread. Luckily I keep all versions until the end of the project so could reimport char styles.from an original file.  Then I changed the style to a completely different one for the section that I had managed to isolate as the problem.

The problem seemed to come from a Word file where Footnotes had been converted to Endnotes and back again. I would suggest if you do have to import a file like that and it is short enough, just get it into a text file (I printed to PDF and exported as a text file from there) to strip out as much formatting as possible. it is a pain to put the formatting back in but I couldn't find another way around it.