Help! My InDesign File isn’t working!

Any pub designer who has worked on a publication for days, weeks or even months knows the sheer terror of worrying  that his/her InDesign file has become corrupt. It happened to us this week. Here are the steps we went through to restore the INDD file to better health, and what eventually was the key to saving it.

1. We restarted our Macs and INDD. This is always the best first step.
2. We did another “save as” to clean up the file. We do this throughout any project at least a few times a week, so this didn’t fix the issue.
3. Next we recomposed all of the text using the keyboard shortcut Command-option-/. Sometimes this works, but this time it didn’t fix our super-slow issues.
4. Most senior pub designers cringe when they have to delete their preferences. We do. But we did it because we know sometimes this works. When we started up INDD, we pressed command-option-ctrl-shift which if our timing was right, threw up a dialog box that allowed us to delete our preferences file. sigh.
5. Next we deleted INDD cache files by going here on our Mac:

   [Home] > Library > Caches > Adobe InDesign > version > language > InDesign Recovery >

6. Finally we exported the document to IDML. We were so happy this worked! Yeah!

A huge thank you to Keith Gilbert from gilbertconsulting.com,  for these fantastic tips he shared at the 2016 INDD Conference in DC.