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Speeding up InDesign: A Chart of Ideas

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Haeme Ulrich, Swiss InDesign and DPS expert and trainer, runs a great blog (if you speak German). He came up with a cool chart of ideas to speed up InDesign. After all, who doesn’t want to make InDesign faster and more efficient?! He translated it into English for us here:

Haeme Ulrich InDesign Speed Chart

You can download it by clicking here or the image above. Great ideas!

David Blatner is the co-founder of the Creative Publishing Network, InDesign Magazine, CreativePro Magazine, and the author or co-author of 15 books, including Real World InDesign. His InDesign videos at LinkedIn Learning (Lynda.com) are among the most watched InDesign training in the world.
You can find more about David at 63p.com

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  • Haeme Ulrich says:

    Thank you David for publishing it! I’m looking forward to meet you all in person at PePcon!

    –Haeme

  • Steve Werner says:

    Thanks, Haeme. Great job!

  • Love it! Thanks Haeme for sharing it…

  • Jamie McKee says:

    Haeme, can you explain “You can temporarily disable a GREP Style by adding * at the beginning of the code”? In what way is it temporary? How is the GREP Style reengaged?

    • Jongware says:

      Jamie, adding a “*” at the start of a GREP style expression makes it an Invalid Syntax, and so it will not be executed any more. GREP styles are ‘run’ virtually continuously, and more than a few slow down ID immensely. To re-enable the GREP style, remove the asterisk at the start again. It’s “temporarily” in the sense that you actually want the GREP styles enabled.

  • Ariel says:

    Nice, but lacking two biggies:
    (1) Avoid split and span columns unless you have to use them
    (2) Avoid very long stories. (Long docs are mentioned in the chart, but I’ve found that long docs do not actually slow down InDesign so much as long stories. A book containing 15 chapters will be really slow if all those chapters are threaded. But if each chap. is a separate story, there shouldn’t be a problem.)

  • csm_phil says:

    Thanks for shared very good information. Please continue if you get new innovative ideas.

  • Bart Van de Wiele says:

    Thanks Haeme!

  • JC says:

    Thank you, very helpful!

  • Robbin says:

    David,

    Where did you find the RAM requirements for indesign Cc?

    All I can find are in Adobe site and they claim for indesign Cc 2015 the minimum RAM 2 GB (ridiculously low) and recommended is 8 GB, and makes no mention of GPU or VRAM requirements.

    Thank you.

    [Voice recognition software was used to compose this email. The technology is far from perfect; please excuse any mistakes.]

  • Max Pinton says:

    Great list. Here’s a Mac-specific gotcha: I had dragged an eps from an email (in Mail) into InDesign long ago, and in earlier versions of MacOS this worked fine. InDesign showed the path somewhere deep in ~/Library. But in Big Sur, this brought ID to an absolute crawl, even when the eps was on a hidden layer. Relinking it to the same file in ~/Documents fixed it.

    • David Blatner says:

      Wow! I wouldn’t have expected that. I wonder if that’s an ID limitation or if Mac is doing something weird in the background. Thanks for letting us know!

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