I'm having the same issues!

I have problems exporting to PDF more than 50% + of the time and that happens no matter if I'm printing from a book export or from the file/export. The background task shows the 0% and won't let me close. I've talked to technical support and after an hour nothing was resolved so I came here. The tech support guy tried to tell me the features in CS5 were more intensive and that's why it's having problems processing.  I'm still feeling frustrated from the call because of the communication problems with the foriegn tech.

Trying to Export a one page .indd into a .pdf and then into an email.

but the font continuously keeps getting altered.

Any ideas???

Thanks

Yes Steve, I'm on a Mac. It's a brand new 27" iMac with duo core processors 3.06 GHz and 8 GB RAM.

Like you, I export PDFs regularly and this has slowed my production time way down.

Someone wrote that if you only use the PDF presets, it works just fine -- I tried that and it didn't work  : (

I can't help but feel that if there was a way to turn off background printing, we wouldn't be having this issue.

Also like you, I'm not a racist. It's just that so much time is spent repeating yourself or having them repeat what they said that it just gets down right frustrating.

Did you preflight before you tried to export. Sometimes that will catch the font issue.

It says I have overset text...

How do I alter this?

OK. Restarted, only Bridge and INDD CS5 open, plus Safari for this thread. Running OS X 10.6.3. I've opened my document (48 page magazine), Opens fine. Export > .idml fails (no apparent action). Trying to close the document brings up the error: "InDesign cannot close the document ... because it is in use by one or more background tasks". Clicking cancel and going to Background Tasks produces the following message: Export: " 0 (with a large cross next to it). Any thoughts?

OK thanks.

Has anyone come up with a solution yet?

To get a PDF,

1. I have to open each doucment
2. export to PDF (which freezes)
3. Force Quit InDesign
4. Reopen InDesign
5. export my document again

All this to get one PDF and I have over 20 more to go....

I just spent another hour with tech support and we've figured out that new files built in CS5 are not having issues -- only those built in previous versions. So, I can convert those files to idml files and CS5 doesn't seem to have an issue making the PDFs. However, this is just a workaround and does not resolve the issue.

Hmmmm.... we only did a simple test on a new file and it worked. I guess I'll have to see when I build the next page/book.

I am having the same issues as well with exporting to Pdf's in the background. And why did Adobe put in a cancel button in the background panel that does not work? Yet if you are doing a book export from the book panel, InDesign CS5 does not go to background printing, but works in the same way it used to do in CS4. If you have a lot of documents put them into a single book (switching off numbering) and output to Pdf from there one by one and the background Pdf 'printing' does not kick in.

Yet I hope Adobe solves this Pdf issue. It sure has to do with the new background Pdf export which is great since one can continue to work. One other thing I have noticed is that for me many times the processing stops at 9%. Once it goes over 9% than I know InDesign CS5 will not stall the export to PDF.

I have found that if I just export a few pages at a time, I don't freeze. This isn't a fix by any means, but at least it's a workaround. I was able to do 10 pages at a time.

I couldn't agree more.

I actually thought I was having the same problem. It appeared as if no progress was being made on the PDF export and I could not save the file because of the background task. After checking on this forum (leaving the document open and still exporting" I returned to the doc to find it had completed the export and was not frozen as I had suspected. Not sure if this is what others are experiencing but it appears my problem was that the export process was taking Much Much longer than prior versions and longer than I expected. Bottom line:  SLOW not Frozen!