What happens if you export to tagged text and then reimport it (in a new document), is it still slow in the same spot?

I have experienced the same behaviour in Indesign CS5 in many documents. Mainly what I found was causing this was that Indesign needed excessive memory to perform recomposing of paragraphs when some or all of the below were the case:

- Is a paragraph very, very large? When paragraphs are large, Indesign needs more memory to recompose the story after editing.

- Are you using a customized Dictionary, have you set up many custom hyphenation words? This can slow Indesign considerably during recomposing of a paragraph after editing, even when just entering a space or fullstop.

- Are you using too many restrictions for H&J's?

- What Display Performance mode are you working on?

- Is Preflight enabled during your editing the suggested pages?

- Is Dynamic Spelling enabled?

Workarounds are:

1. Try to disable Preflight. You can turn it back on after you have finished working on your document.

2. Try working in Fast Display mode

3. Try adjusting H&Js giving Indesign more freedom during recomposing of paragraphs.

4. Try splitting very large paragraphs.

5. Turn Dynamic Spelling off.

For me, just disabling Preflight and working in Fast Display mode was enough for most of the troublesome documents.

Did you have "Balance Columns" turned on?

I just ran into this problem too. I solved it by turning "Balance Columns" off.
I created a very simple 8.5x11 with one copy box filled with placeholder text (Helvetica Medium Condensed) to show my department the Split, Span and Balance features in CS5. I edited some of the Span headlines, even deleting the space before them to flow into body copy above and that's where I started slowing down. Preflight was off, Fast Display was on. I turned off the "Balance Columns" and it fixed the problem right away. Turn "Balance Columns" on and the slowness is back.

I hope this helps.

In an attempt to correct the slow responding document, I opened a new template and transferred the content of the slow document into the new document file. In the process of doing so, ID crashed a couple of times. When recovering, ID told me the slow file may be damaged.

If I highlighted the entire thread, the blue rotating circle would popup and delay the process. I started at the beginning and worked my way through the content, moving chunks (graphics included) at a time. Finally, I grabbed a chunk where the blue rotating circle appeared after the Ctrl-C. I found that, if I highlighted two paragraphs (not in sequence) and copied, the blue circle would appear. I deleted and retyped the paragraphs in the original document. Problem solved, so I thought. Now I think I have a bad figure caption style, because when I try to cross reference to a caption, ID crashes. Going back to update and work in the new document file; it may be quicker.

Some of this text was originally copied and pasted from Quark file for updating. Not sure, but this may have resulted in my issue.

Maybe I should switch to Apple.

I can assure you that I'm having the same issue in performance. It's not to do with copying text from another document because I haven't done so. It seems all to do with having Title and section paragraph styles set to Span across columns. Definitely a bug. I even tried splitting up my 200 page book's 23 chapters into individual indd files in hopes that it would help things out, but still nothing. The current rate in which InDesign is generating characters at about 1 character per second at this point. This also by the way is affected in Story Editor as well, since it updates the formatted WYSIWYG text in real-time.

Edit: Balanced columns, actually! I toggled between the two and bamph, works tons better. Still a bug, really would love to see it corrected.

We might simply be talking about two separate situations then with similar symptoms then. And anything that brings my performance experience down to a crawl I consider a bug.

This is definitely an issue in the Windows environment that has absolutely no impact in a Mac environment. I was just introduced to it, and I'm really scratching my head.  I do most of my layout on a really nice Intel Mac using ID CS5, and I'm currently working on a huge project with multiple team members working on a variety of computers. I was unaware until yesterday that one of the team members who is working on a Windows 7 laptop was having problems making text edits in documents that work just fine on my Mac. There was a severe lag when typing. She could go get a coffee while waiting for one simple typed sentence to appear on the screen. We opened up system resources and everything is maxing out while text is being typed, CPU, memory, network. It's a real stumper. This is not a simple machine, it was purchased to be a graphic design computer and has really good specs, but just to make sure it wasn't the computer, I tried it on two other PCs. One is my laptop that I freelance on and the other is a fellow designer's machine that has absolutely amazing specs (actually better than my Mac), both running Windows 7.  On all three computers I have the same typing lag, though I can reduce the lag some by turning off everything that saps ID performance (auto preflight, screen redraw, dynamic spelling, balance columns, etc.).  The files are on a server, so I even tried copying them to the local harddrive and severing link and InCopy connections. I've tried turning off balance columns and still the lag.  The lag is most prominent in a fairly complex table and I've noticed it is worse when editing text that is on a 10 percent black background. 

I can provide a file to play with if anyone wants to see the behavior. I can reproduce it on any computer with a Windows environment (both CS5 and CS5.5).  I would appreciate a fix either in the way my documents are created or for the app because I'm doing hundreds of these documents for the next couple years and this lag is a severe problem in our workflow.

Peter, I just sent you the message with a download link to a sample file.

CME, my files almost always link to external files (kind of defeats the purpose of ID if you can't do that). These files have links to AI graphic files and the story is exported as an InCopy story. However, I broke the links, to the story at least, with no impact to the typing lag. The particular file that I sent Peter does not contain hyperlinks or cross references, though some of them do have internal cross referencing.

I am aware there are missing fonts. It doesn't really effect those on the Win machines on our end (no crashing, anyway), the fonts they can't use do not effect text flow. I'm the one outputting the final files, and I have the fonts.  I was not aware I was using a dfont until you mentioned it. Zapf Dingbats is identified as TT inside Adobe. Wish I could replace it, but that's the only version of that font that I have, and it's a somewhat vital character in the layout. I'll have to see if I can find that character in another font. I'll have to check to see where the Wingdings is used. I don't recall using it anywhere. However, the IC user has not had an issue with the missing fonts other than having the pink text. Not sure why it would effect ID users or cause a typing lag.

You asked about the plugins. I have several plugins installed on my Mac. The only one used in the creation of this document (and actually not directly to the document, but to the text in another document before being moved into the template) is the Side Heads plugin. The rest just taint the document because that's what some plugins do if you have them installed (something that actually seriously annoys me about plugin behavior in ID).

Yes, InTools Side Heads. I would not be able to create these files without that valuable little plugin. Absolutely love it!