InDesign Document Repair: Extreme
March 27th, 2008Anne-Marie has presented a session on “The Zen of InDesign Repair” at the last couple of InDesign conferences, and it’s always well-attended. After all, anyone who has been using InDesign for a while knows that sometimes (fortunately not frequently, but sometimes…) files get corrupted, or weird stuff starts happening in the program.
She talked about this in this post about rebuilding the preferences files, and it’s all still as true today as it was back then.
People have come up with all kinds of great techniques for rescuing files, but Anne-Marie recently pointed this blog post out to me, and I have to say it takes the cake — both for being ingenious and painful. Basically, this guy had a corrupted file (it crashed InDesign each time he opened it), so he used Markzware’s ID2QX XTension to open the file in QuarkXPress, saved the file, and then used their Q2ID plug-in to open it back up in InDesign!
By the way, the video on that blog post didn’t work when I tried it. To see the video of him converting the file, check ou this youtube link.
Seems like Markzware could save him (or others) a lot of time by just making a converter/repair utility, much like their old MarkzTools product did for XPress. Anyone else want that?
Update 4/10: Arnold at Markzware posted another (more detailed) movie on youtube about converting corrupt InDesign documents. Also, if you have corrupted documents, check out this post, asking for samples so they can try to create a “fix it” tool.
One has to wonder what percentage of corrupted documents could actually be salvaged in this fashion.
Dave
I take a lot of documents that came from one typesetting package and converted to rtf and reimported to InDesign, to keep the styles in tack.
My InDesign file has all styles set up, so I can easily map the styles to the InDesign ones.
One thing I noticed was that sometimes I would be working on the document and it won’t get by a specific page or pages.
What sometimes happens is that the styles (or information in the styles) get crossed, i.e., it tries to apply a character style where a character style is already there within a paragraph style.
So the simplest solution I found was to zoom on the page so I could see just that page. Then inserting the type tool I press SHIFT and then on the pages panel click about 3 pages down. Then click again, now all the type is selected.
I simply click NONE on the chara styles panel and basic paragraph on the paragraph panels.
Sure I have to go in and set those couple of pages. But it stops InDesign crashing. And a lot of the time, it’s exactly why the file was crashing.
Although, just watched the video, that is excellent, I’ll be sure to remember that if a file ever melts down like that. Excellent stuff.