Performance, InDesign lockups, and Cross-References

[keithconover]

I have a long (150 page) chapter, with lots of frames, and I put in a lot of cross-references, on the order of 50. It finally got to the point that, when I tried to move a text frame, InDesign would lock up. I created a new document, exported the text to .rtf and Placed it again. This stripped out all of my text anchors and made all of my cross-references into literal text. That's the bad news. The good news is now InDesign doesn't lock up when I move a text frame. I think I put in too many cross-references and it finally got to where the complexity and thus computational burder of moving the targets of the cross-references became more than InDesign can handle.

How many cross-references are safe to put in a document? And are cross-references to other documents worse than cross-references within the same document?

I also found that this export-to-rtf and Place did other bad things to my file:

• Adds a carriage return at the end of each footnote.
• Overrides the styles for almost all of my styled paragraphs: Iasigned
  Panel Paragragh Clear Overrides to F12 and had to do this on all of
  the headings to restore my desired formatting.

[TᴀW]

Fifty internal cross-references should be fine. I mean, x-refs that refer to the same document they're in.

But x-refs to other documents are problematic, because InDesign has to keep opening those docs in the background to check the x-refs.

To improve performance in such a case, make sure that ALL the docs that are being references are open all the time. That avoids forcing ID to open and close them in the background all the time.