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Inspiring
June 4, 2018
Question

Text disappearing

  • June 4, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 963 views

I'm laying out a book, and the other day I had some small sections of text "disappear", they were still there, just not showing up. I could highlight the text, see the highlight, but not the actual text. A couple times this happened, and I changed the color of the text and it reappeared. But now I've got two pages of text that aren't coming back no matter how many times I change the color. Any troubleshots? CC/Mac

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    1 reply

    Bill Silbert
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    June 4, 2018

    First thing to try would be to trash your InDesign preferences.

    To do so:

    With InDesign closed Launch a Finder Window in column view and click on your home folder. With the Option Key pressed choose Library from the Finder Go Menu. Within the Library folder find the folder called Preferences and within it find the following two files and delete them: “Adobe InDesign” and “com.adobe.InDesign.plist”. 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.

    Bill Silbert
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    June 4, 2018

    In addition to the above, I would suggest opening any earlier version of the file and seeing if the same problem happens. If not then it is possible that there may be some corruption in the later file. You can try exporting it as an IDML file and then reopening it in your version of InDesign. This process can sometimes eliminate some "mild" corruption.