Tabs Crashing Indesign

[lisajanecreative]

Hi Everyone, I seem to be having issues with tabs in indesign. Eveytime I go to open the tabs window my indesign crashes - I basically cant use tabs which is very problamatic when you do Annual Reports for a living - Please Help!!!!!

[lisajanecreative]

I am running Catalina 10.15.7 (19H2), Using Indesign 2020

I cant upgrade any more due to my macs age. So I need a fix. It just started happening  - I had not updated anything on my mac.

[Bill Silbert]

Try resetting your InDesign preferences. This will restore the program to its defaults and, hopefully, fix this issue.

To do so on a Mac:

The User Library folder in which InDesign’s preferences are stored is hidden by default on most Macintoshes. To access it make sure that InDesign is closed and click on the desktop to launch a Finder Window (Command-N). With this window in column view follow the path User>Home folder (it’s the folder with an icon that looks like a house—it may have the user’s name rather than “Home”) and click on the Home folder. With the Option Key pressed choose Library from the Finder Go Menu. “Library” will now appear within the Home folder. Within the Library folder find the folder called Preferences and within it find the folder called “Adobe InDesign” and the file called “com.adobe.InDesign.plist” and delete both that folder and that file. When InDesign is next launched it will create new preference files and the program will be restored to its defaults.

The advantage of manually deleting preference files in this manner is that after you’ve reset up the program (make sure that no document window is open) to your liking, you can create copies of your personalized “mint” preference files (make sure that you quit the program before copying them—that finalizes your customization) and use them in the future to replace any corrupt versions you may need to delete.

[Diane Burns]

Couple of things to add to Bill's reply:

-- does this happen with different documents, or just one document? If the one document, save out as .idml (Save as >) and try again

-- if you don't need multiple or backup pref files as Bill's technique allows, you can also delete the preferences file for InDesign, InCopy, or any other program in the Creative Suite by quitting the program, then hold down the Command-Option-Shift-Ctrl keys (on Windows, hold down Control-Alt-Shift) while you start the program up again.