Any updates on the questions asked in this thread? I think it might be more productive to use this one rather than the other thread...

Well, there's no strong evidence that this is tied to Helvetica. We'll have to see, I guess.

Your original post made it seem like you had a good test case for this problem...maybe it's less reliable than it seemed.

Think of this not as a solution to the problem, but rather as the first step in trying to diagnose it. Once we know what font (assuming it is a font), then we can look at mitigation steps. Maybe the font you have is corrupt? Or an older or newer version gives substantially the same look but without the crash. Etc.

Hmm yes, I've just had my first crash of the day - tried to package a file and it froze when copying the font files over.

Well, that does seem a plausible summary of what is happening. Your crash report is of particular interest, because it doesn't really implicate InDesign:

Thread 34 Crashed:

0   com.apple.CoreFoundation           0x91f6f65f _CFURLIsFileURL + 15

1   com.apple.CoreFoundation           0x91fd2a80 CFURLSetResourcePropertiesForKeys + 32

2   com.apple.DesktopServices          0x90bc6af0 TCopyWriter::WriteDates() + 990

3   com.apple.DesktopServices          0x90bc639f TCopyWriter::WriteExtendedAttributes() + 357

4   com.apple.DesktopServices          0x90bc00f3 TCopyWriter::Write() + 185

5   com.apple.DesktopServices          0x90bbf9d5 TCopyWriter::WriteTaskProc(void*) + 75

6   ...ple.CoreServices.CarbonCore     0x9294254a PrivateMPEntryPoint + 68

7   libSystem.B.dylib                  0x90a06259 _pthread_start + 345

8   libSystem.B.dylib                  0x90a060de thread_start + 34

so, that is a crash in Apple code. Now, of course, the apple code was called from InDesign, and there's a certain degree of garbage-in-garbage-out. If you ask the operating system to copy a nonexistent file to a nonexistent device, it might crash. It shouldn't but it might.

And if we look at thread 0, which is InDesign code, we can sort of see where InDesign invoked the operating system:

Thread 0:  Main Thread  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

0   libSystem.B.dylib                  0x90a06aa2 __semwait_signal + 10

1   libSystem.B.dylib                  0x90a0675e _pthread_cond_wait + 1191

2   libSystem.B.dylib                  0x90a083f8 pthread_cond_wait$UNIX2003 + 73

3   ...ple.CoreServices.CarbonCore     0x9297721e TSWaitOnCondition + 126

4   ...ple.CoreServices.CarbonCore     0x92962b68 TSWaitOnConditionTimedRelative + 202

5   ...ple.CoreServices.CarbonCore     0x9295e533 MPWaitOnQueue + 250

6   com.apple.DesktopServices          0x90bc730b TCopyQueue::WaitOnRecordDone() + 55

7   com.apple.DesktopServices          0x90bc1287 TCopyReader::GetNextItem() + 875

8   com.apple.DesktopServices          0x90bbfdf6 TCopyReader::Read(unsigned long long, TCountedPtr<TCFURLInfo> const&, TCountedPtr<TCFURLInfo> const&) + 164

9   com.apple.DesktopServices          0x90bf64e3 TFSCopyOperation::CopyToTarget() + 613

10  com.apple.DesktopServices          0x90bf9228 TFSCopyOperation::DoCopy(TCountedPtr<TCFURLInfo> const&) + 780

11  com.apple.DesktopServices          0x90bf9898 TFSCopyOperation::Run() + 174

12  com.apple.DesktopServices          0x90bee5e9 _NodeOperation + 438

13  ...ple.CoreServices.CarbonCore     0x929c2090 _FSOperateOnObjectSync + 352

14  ...ple.CoreServices.CarbonCore     0x929c228f _FSPathOperateOnObjectSync + 210

15  AdobeAFL                           0x016e9101 adobe::afl::CoreFileUtils::CopyFile(adobe::afl::AFile const&, adobe::afl::AFile const&, bool) + 365

16  PublicLib.dylib                    0x014339da FileLinkResourceHandler::CopyToFile(UIDRef const&, URI const&, IDFile&) const + 58

17  com.adobe.InDesign.Links           0x21c54c4e 0x21bd8000 + 511054

So, where does that leave us? Well, we would like to know what file is being copied, and why the file copy operation caused the operating system to crash the program.

Are you sure it was a font? Could it have been copying another linked file?

I don't suppose you have any folks around the office who know their way around Apple's Xcode tools, that are used for developing Objective C applications? There are some ways to figure out what file is causing InDesign to crash, but they're all kind of cryptic and annoying to explain without doing it in person...

If not, let me know and I'll try to figure out a simple way to explain it... (and to figure out which of the cryptic tools are the best ones to recommend for this situation. A question that might take me some time to answer....)

Sarah:

  Well, your last post reminds me of some other things to try.

Have you exported this document to IDML and re-opened it? That sometimes clears corruption.

If you try to explain it, I can probably do it myself, one thing that I will mention - and I'm not sure if this could be a cause for crashing - but my mac is linked to my manager's mac. So majority of my files are on two externals - DATA 1 and DATA 2. So I save most of my files to her externals and not my Mac HD. This also may have nothing to do with it, just thought it may be worth mentioning.

I would say that is all too likely to be related, yes! Were you packaging to one of the remote filesystems?  Can you please package to a local filesytem?

What about if you copy the InDesign file to local disk first?

Unfortunately to do this test properly might require copying all the links as well, and then disconnecting the network filesystem and manually relinking, and then executing the package command. That sounds like a pain. But maybe you could do it on a copy of the file and delete all the pages except for 1 and then fix 1 link. Of course you'd need to make sure that 1 link still caused the problem on the network.

I don't see why the PC thing would be related.

It sounds like your IT guys are probably not sufficient mac experts to be of the sort of assistence i was asking about (not too surprising, really).