Tagged text is a way to export text from InDesign and retain formatting information. Place your cursor in a story and go to File > Export... and Tagged Text will appear in the list. Try this with one or two stories to see what happens.

I'm not sure what you mean by moving content, since that's pretty vague and could mean anything from moving pages to copying and pasting frames or copying the content inside the frames and pasteing into new frames in a new file, which is what I asked you to try. The goal is to get the content, without the containers, into a new file for testing.

Since this is the first time you've provided any sort of detail regarding the document structure it's clear that doing the things I asked will be time consuming if done manually. I'm not a scripter, but I suspect that scripts can be written that will automate both tasks.

You've mentioned talking to "Adobe Technicians" a couple of times now. Do you have a support contract, or are you talking with the outsourced support people in India? If the latter, unless you've managed to get yourself escalated quite a way up the food chain you aren't really talking to an Adobe "technician," but rather someone looking in the knowledgebase and reading from there or from some other script. The odds that this person is an actual user of InDesign, let alone a skilled user or troubleshooter, is pretty slim.

Here on the forum we are all volunteers, some of us with years of practical real world experience with both Adobe products and the hardware and software that the applications run on. I've been a production user of InDesign since version 2.0 was released and I dabble in building and troubleshooting PCs and the Windows OS (though I don't claim to be an expert in the inner workings of Windows). John, who was here earlier, has extensive experience troubleshooting InDesign and is a Linux and Mac OS developer in his spare time, I think. He knows more about the inner workings of ID, I suspect, than anyone not actually on the Adobe payroll. He is probably also our top expeert on Mac system issues, which unfortunately may not be helpful for your Windows system.

The point I am trying to make here is that talking to tech support may not get you good answers, but if you answer our questions here, and follow the directions we give, we actually have an extremely high rate for actual problem solving, many times after a user such as you has tried the Tech Support line without success.

OK, so you're pretty good with computers. That helps. I wish I could say I thought that "Tech Support" was ever helpful, but honestly even escalated I'm not sure you ever get to someone who knows what they are doing. I'd be encouraged if someone you talked to asked you to send the file in for examination, but it doesn't sound like that has happened, so I doubt you've reached any one at Quality Assurance yet.

I will use the word corruption because from my point of view it fits. You are suggesting, and it makes sense, that something (a container, frame, etc.) is holding corrupted or corrupting data that is causing this problem. (In Word, for example, the ¶ and section breaks hold formatting information; when the formatting gets corrupted, that corruption is generally held in one of those. Find the right one and it usually removes the problems.  And regarding Word, the word used is "corruption.") That it happened to two unrelated files (we all suffer from the post hoc ergo proper hoc syndrome) may be coincidence. 

That's it, exactly.  Most file "corruption" in ID is either so serious that file is unopenable, or it responds to cleaning via export. That John and I both started by saying we didn't see evidence of corruption simple means your problem is very atypical. The export method is really a side-effect benefit, not an intended consequence of exporting to interchange. In my experience, .inx (the older format) was more reliable as a cleaner than .idml, and given a choice, that's the one I pick. Do you think you've used any features in the file that would be lost by exporting all the way  back to CS3 and .inx? Do you have CS4 availble? If not, I'd be willing to try that for you and see what happens.

molezeen wrote:

 

I was asked to upload a file for test.  That represents two of the "we'll call you back" promises never kept.  The other file that "corrupted first" came from a Word file I flowed into an InDesign file. So the process of adding text was completely different between the two; but both have the exact same problems.

Not cool. Did you get a name or a case number?

I have some limited contacts at Adobe, so I'll send some emails and see if I can get someone to follow through with you.

I haven't had a chance to read this thread in detail, but are your multiple corrupt documents sharing something in common? Did they originate from a common template? Were master pages copied from one to another. Was one file used as the basis for another?

Have you been able to reduce the corruption down to a minimal document?

I'll try to review this later today and see if I have any more useful insight beyond being grumpy about the version numbers (sorry about that).

OK, so, I finally got a chance to read this through this thread. Can you post a link to one of the problem documents, or email one to me?

(Sorry, I had thought you had done so earlier, but I realized I just misinterpretted something you said).

Another thing to try, of course, is testing against CS6 (8.0.0.370). CS6 does fix a number of bugs and it's where engineers do development, so it's most likely to get easily fixed in CS6 before CS5.5, and there's a not-insignificant chance that CS6 fixes your problem already.

I think your best bet at this point is to try to isolate the problem and determine what about your documents causes this problem. While getting a new version of InDesign out that fixes your problem is not going to happen quickly (if at all), figuring out how to avoid the problem certainly is doable. After all thousands of people use ID every day and don't see this.

The best start is to get a minimal document that exhibits the problems (as few pages as possible). Once there, exporting it to IDML and opening the IDML in ID to confirm the corruption survives the IDML. If that's the case, then you can unzip the IDML and inspect it (it is human-readable XML) and try to determine what is unique/special about your document.

This might be a long odyssey. Of course, my experience is that putting in the effort is more likely to get you results than letting Adobe Support do it for you, but you might have a different scenario.

I don't want to make excuses for them, but I suspect what's going on is that the support people you are talking to are waiting for the higher-level support people, or even for Engineering, and they don't have good control over the timliness of those other people. But that's not an excuse for giving you callback estimates that are not met -- Adobe seems to have a serious problem with this and I would not give them a free pass for it. It seems to happen all too often.

If you totally get stuck you could try asking for the Noida Duty Manager and see what that gets you (Noida, UP, India is the location of Adobe's support center).

But realistically, I'm not sure that is going to make engineering work any faster. Maybe it'll just make them give you more realistic estimates for calls-back...

I understand. Unfortunately it is probably the only way we will able to provide assistance.

Good luck!

"But isn't InDesign intended to use multiple master pages, and aren't they set up so that they can be linked together?"

"Yes, but you used multiple master pages [12 total], that is why you have problem.  You have them linked to Master A, you must have them linked to None, then it will work."

I think you have to read this a bit more carefully, realizing that it's probably not written by a native English speaker, and realize that it's not Orwellian.

You are dealing with a bug.

Of course InDesign isn't supposed to have bugs, but everything has bugs.

There is some reason why the bug is being triggered in this case. This guy is trying to tell you that the problem is related to chained master pages (I think. Though that detail isn't critical to my point), which is not something that everyone does, and if your master pages were arranged differnetly, you wouldn't have the problem.

This is undoubtedly true. He's advising you of the area in which the bug lies. This is useful information, because it gives you a clue as to how to avoid the problem.

It's not meant to be a "solution," but it's informatino about the problem so you can workaround it. And indeed, so Engineering can fix it.

I am curious, do you have 12 independent masters, or do you have masters that are based on other masters, or deeper hierarchy levels?

Oh right, I have your sample file. Yeah, you have A on which you base B on which you base C on which you base D ... all the way to M (13).

That's definitely not a common configuration, and one I suspect you could avoid by flattening your master hierarchy a bit. It's a lot more common to have, say, 8 master based on 4 different masters.

In formatting a book with 16 chapters, where each chapter has it's own headers (e.g. title/author, or title/chapter name), this is easily accomodated with linked master pages. If the author changes the tile of his book from "Around the World in 97 Days" to "Around the World in 80 Days" it's a piece of cake to change that, once, and it flows through the entire book.  The text in the running heads is the only difference between the master pages.

I'm afraid I don't understand.

It's quite common to have, say, 11 master pages all based off a single master page. That is, Page A has common elements, and then pages B through M are based off of page A. It would seem like that would fit your requirements handily. Two levels of hierarchy.

It's also reasonably common to have a bit more hierarchy. B, C, and D are based off of A, and are 3 different variants. Then E though M are based off of B, C, and D, depending. And then perhaps there is a special variant of M that changes on item. So three levels of hierarchy, plus the odd 4th.

But what is uncommon is to have a twelve levels of hierarchy. Certainly it should work, but it's out of the ordinary, and bugs often arise in out of the ordinary situations.

InDesign can easily handle many many master pages. But what's special in your case is the hierarchy depth. So comparing it to 80+ headers in Word is not the right comparison.

Creating separate master pages, where everything has to be created from scratch, could take me several hours (sixteen masters total), and wouldn't be as goods as linking them. 

Link them all to a single master and spend a few minutes cutting and pasting pages. I don't see why it would take several hours at all.

OK, I don't have any files I can find with more than two or three masters based on the same parent, nor any with a chain of masters such as you initially described where a is based on b is based on c is based on d is based on e... so that page z would have 25 generations of parenting to go back through. Note that this is NOT  the scenario described in the help quote above. That desribes b based on a, c based on a, d based on a, and so forth, and that's a quite common setup.

It wouldn't surprise me to see a long document with more layers of dependency, but I've never needed to go more than three, nor do I recall a case where I needed more than about a half-dozen masters in any single document, certainly not since the introduction of variables, but I tend to build really long docs as Books, not single files, just to make it easier to navigate and to spread the risk of total destruction. That said, I find the not-more-than-three-or-four-masters explanation completely without credibility. For one thing, I can't imagine you are the only one to ever try it, and if you are not, I can't imagine that in ten years nobody else has posted this "design limitation."

There is no question that you should be able to do what you are describing. If you are getting document corruption due to using this type of document organization, you are indeed encountering a bug. And even if is either a built-in or defacto limit to such chaining of master pages in InDesign, the program should prevent you from having any more than such a limit and certainly not let your document.

I've looked through our internal bug database and could not find any open bug that seems to correspond with anything like this. Do you have any information from whoever spoke to you in Tech Support, either a bug number or a case number for your incident?

          - Dov