CS5 Indesign - crashing on pdf export... sometimes

[MassMacGuy]

Hi All, I work for a commercial printer and we just recently made the upgrade to CS5 as well as Suitcase Fusion 3 for font management. Before this we used an older Suitcase and CS4, no problems.

Now there are certain times when I export to a pdf, you can hear the hard drive start to crank for a second and Indesign crashes. My way around it is to print to a postscript and distill it.

I'm wondering if perhaps this is a font issue but don't understand why because all was fine before the upgrade.

If I change all fonts to Times for instance in a problem document it will pdf just fine. Also noticed that if I export using the interactive pdf option, a problem file will also pdf out correctly but I need to be using the print quality options.

Any thoughts?

 

[Blue Velvet]

What are your standard settings for creating these PDFs? Are they for CTP use?

What OS are you running on your machines and what Distiller settings seem to be working?

 

[MassMacGuy]

The pdfs are not for CTP, usually a pdf is for a client proof or if we are running on a digital press. Usually output using the Press Quality option.

I'm running 10.6.4, and any setting within distiller works like a charm.

It's just frustrating to crash, reopen, save again and print to file.

Weeding through thousands of fonts doesn't sound like much fun to me either but I'm wondering if I should. I thought about removing all fonts from Suitcase and storing them in a folder elsewhere.

I would think that keeping the 2,000 or so Adobe Open Type fonts in there would be a good idea and then slowly bringing back any others as certain jobs that need them come back up.

This might be a good way to weed out alot of duplicates.

What do you think?

 

[Blue Velvet]

What do you think?

I think you're dealing with a lot of variables and at root, my hunch is that Suitcase and possible activation plug-ins might lie at the heart of it.

Two things to check:

1. I'm assuming all documents flight-check OK in InDesign?
2. Same crashes occur when creating PDFs to PDF/X 1A or 3?

 

[MassMacGuy]

Indeed I am dealing with many variables, Docs ok with Indesign flight check, other pdf export options also crash.

What do you mean by activation plug ins?

 

[Blue Velvet]

What do you mean by activation plug ins?

OK, so you don't have any installed. I think what I'd do in this situation is to create a test document so that nothing important got corrupted, just a blank page with some text boxes and some copy in maybe 2-4 different uncommon faces... make sure that the master pages are clean of all furniture and guides.

... and then I'd remove just those fonts from Suitcase, activate them with FontBook instead to see whether that works. My vague bet is that it's Suitcase causing the problems and that you'll have to do a bit of trial and error to isolate the issue.

Unfortunately, I can't replicate your precise setup here because while I'm running CS5, I'm still on 10.5.8 with Linotype FontExplorer.

 

[MassMacGuy]

Thanks for your help Blue Velvet, I'll do just that and see where I end up.

Here's another question, through all my years of using Indesign, at different companies, different computers, even on the PC, I have had another unexplained thing.

SOmetimes a pdf, usually with an element that uses a drop shadow or other effect, you can see these faint lines in the pdf in that area. It's always been a case of yes there in the pdf but when you go to print an epson proof or to plate, all is like it should be, no lines.

Ever seen that?

 

[Blue Velvet]

Ever seen that?

Yep. It's called stitching and happens when transparency is flattened to lower PDF specs like PDF 1.3 (Acrobat 4), for instance.

 

[Philalbe]

I know it's a completely different program, but pdf's used to crash on me often when I used to use Quark 7. I was sometimes able to work around it by exporting the file as a ps (post script) file first and then I would run it through Acrobat Distiller to generate a PDF.

 

[neutrino23]

I recently had a similar issue in CS3 InDesign. A document that used to work fine started crashing on export to PDF. This was only a four page brochure so I made a new, blank document and started copying over groups of things and exporting to PDF. Eventually narrowed it down to one image that was causing the problem. I passed it through Graphic Converter saving it as a different file type and after that the document worked fine.

Maybe I did it the hard way. Perhaps you could export only a few pages at a time till you find the offending object. Of course, if this only happens once in a while that will be very hard to track down.

 

[colinlee11]

CS6 indesign crash fix

I was having the same problem, I fixed it by cmd A, cmd X then cmd V to re-paste the text back into the document. Some the text appeared to have become hidden within the page flow, the documents I'm working on are 600 page multi-lingual text books, with lots of graphics and hyperlinks etc.
I hope this works for you too.
Colin