Troubleshooting PDF Export Issues in InDesign Failure in Spread with page 369

[Poerk1980]

I want to export a book document in InDesign to PDF. It consists of 7 book parts, but I keep getting an error message saying that the PDF cannot be generated. I also combined the 7 book sections into one file, but I get the same error message. The possible cause of the error seems to be located on the spread with page number 369. Using the "Package" and "Preflight" tools, no errors are detected. Exporting the PDF from the individual book file works fine. I have checked all images and gradients but cannot find any issues. Despite repeated export attempts, I keep encountering the same error. The export process appears to complete successfully, but as soon as it finishes, an error message appears, and no PDF is generated. How do I solve this? 

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@Poerk1980

I mean - have you updated to 2025 in October - from 2024?

2025 is still very buggy... 

[BobLevine]

Thank you. First thing to try is changing the 450 to 300. Let us know what happens there.

[Poerk1980]

You mean the images with 450dpi, change those to 300dpi?

[BobLevine]

In the compression tab where is says 300 for images over 450, change the 450 to 300.

[Poerk1980]

Here's what I did and tried and the status:
• Export settings edited to: Standard PDF/X:2010 Compatibility Acrobat 7 (PDF 1.6).
• Edited all images with a file size above 1GB to reduce them below 1GB.
• Removed all images located outside the page boundaries.
• Made sure all images are linked with status OK, all pre-flights come back green with no issues or errors.
• Combined all 7 book parts back into a single file (to locate possible content issue)
• The reason I split the book into parts was for printing purposes, but I definitely also want to be able to export and have a high-quality digital version of the entire book in PDF format.
• Export of seperate book parts is succesful without any errors.
• Attempted export (while nothing else was running): the process runs completely to the very end but then reports it cannot export PDF due to a possible failure on spread 426.
• Ran the export 2 times with the same error: Notice the total page count for the book is 2x426, which equals 852 pages.

This strengthend my belief that the issue is not related to links or images but rather to file ampunts, file size or other resource limitations or settings. The odd thing is that the last time the entire book exported successfully was 5 October, with almost the same amount of content and pages—apart from the last six pages. Total file size of that PDF is 2.1 GB. 

I have other large books, including one with 472 pages with a PDF output size of 1.6GB and that file is not giving me any issues to export.

Then....I did another PDF expert attempt with the above settings, BUT:
• Changed compression for images over 450, changed the 450 to 300.

Then finally I got a succesful PDF export of the total of 1.7 GB (guess smaller than october PDF due to reducing image sizes) 

I am still not sure what the issue is but it might be in the compression for the large file or total file size .. or?

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

@Poerk1980

Can you monitor your drive's free space and memory use by InDesign?

There was a thread few months ago, where InDesign would crash because it consumed all resources - there was no free space left on the (system) drive. 

[BobLevine]

I'm glad my suggestion helped. I never really understood that default setting anyway. If you need 300ppi graphics then everything larger than that should be downsampled.

Here's another fun fact: Beyond very, very high-end printing, even 300 is a bit of overkill.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Everything depends on LPI.

[Peter Spier]

What sort of images are these, how many, and how large are they?

Have you checked the effective resolutions in InDesign?

You've indicated his is a new problem. Has the nature of your documents changed? have there been any system configuration changes/updates that might be related?

Have you tied things like starting in safe mode or using a new user account, or even a differnt computer, to do the export?

[Poerk1980]

Thanks for staying on me to figure this issue out.

The images are 300 DPI minimum, CMYK, TIFF. So they are rather large file sizes.
The nature of my document has not changed. I don't recall any significant system config changes.
I have not tried on a different compyter or device as the images ar elinked and it would require to transfer my hard disk and my other device is a Macbook Air which won't have the power to make export of such complex huge files. My desktop should be equipped as it's always been.
I also checked the effective resolutions, I am not sure what the minimum or maximum is that could cause the export to fail. Please let me know what to check for. The status of ALL images is OK. I think a relative minor detail is cuasing the export issue since there are no isuses running the entire export until it's ready and then displays the error. Even exporting ithout the possible spread causing teh failure caused the same result. I believe one of the images out of these thousands migth be corrupt somehow, it's a matter of finding it as the regular checks and preflights do not signal an error.

[Peter Spier]

OK.

Effective resolutions over 300 ppi are larger than necessary for anything but 1-bit line art, which should be fine at 1200 ppi, unles you are printing fine art books on high-end equipment, at which point those values might want to be doubled.

One reason your files are big is that you've converted the images to CMYK, so they have 33% more data than they would as RGB. Current best practice is to leave all images in RGB and do any color conversion at the RIP where the correct output color profile is known (CMYK profiles are kind of like regional dialects -- they need to match the ink and paper conditions of the output device for best color control).

We haven't talked about fonts, yet, either.  Fonts can be big, even very big, especially for open-type fonts with thousands of glyphs, and if you use lots of them in your doc and don't subset on export PDF size will balloon.

As two next steps I would first, do a Save AS on all the component .indd files to force a re-write and remove any file bloat, then export as PDF-X/4 and see what you get. If things are still huge, Make a new User account on the computer and try that, and finally, start in Safe Mode, launch InDesign and export with nothing else running.

I'm on the road so won't be able to respond for most of the day, but you're in good hands with the other folks who are on this thread -- reliable experts all.

[BobLevine]

PLEASE! We need to see a screenshot of the various panes of the PDF export. This is especially important for the compression pane. There is no way this is normal and unless you supply that, we, or at the very least, I, have no place to start.

[Poerk1980]

[Peter Spier]

Found this old thread that might be relevant:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/acrobat-discussions/is-there-a-pdf-size-limit/td-p/4387325

[Peter Spier]

And this general article as well: https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/hub/why-is-pdf-so-big.html