Overset Text and Benchmarks

[lakesean]

I have a couple of questions about dealing with variable data in InDesign.

1.) Is there a way of finding and dealing with overset text before creating a merged document? I'm actually waiting on the program now to finish finding overset text so I can correct those pages and get things ready to print. It's 6 addresses out of 4,500 that I need to fix so I don't want to change the whole document to deal with those 6. They're people with really long names and I want to be able to control where the line break is.

2.) Does anyone have any benchmarks on the time it takes XMPIE to do a data merge vs InDesign. I've noticed that InDesign starts to bog down a lot no matter what system you're on around 1,500-2,000 records. I've done some testing with XMPIE and it seems better, but I don't have any hard numbers.

[BobLevine]

2 is going to depend very heavily on the system InDesign is installed on.

[lakesean]

What bit of hardware is InDesign most dependent on? Here's a quick rundown of the systems I've been using it on.
1.) Windows 7  Desktop with 3ghz i3 dual core, on-board graphics, and 4gigs of ram.

2.) Windows 10 Laptop with 2.5ghz i7dual core, dedicated MX940 graphics card and on-board graphics, and 8 gigs of ram.

3.) Windows 10 Desktop with 4ghz FX-8350 8 core, dedicated card (I don't remember the model), and 16 gigs of ram.

Obviously as I went up in power things improved but nothing noticeable or significant.

[BobLevine]

What version of InDesign?

[lakesean]

CC2017

[BobLevine]

And how long is this taking? I've done some pretty large data merges but nothing in the thousands and haven't noticed anything bogging down for too long.

[joekosoglow]

I'm somewhat new to InDesign.  I've created pages for our catalog and get the following message when I want to print:

There is overset text on these pages......

How do I determine what the overset text is?

[rob day]

How do I determine what the overset text is?

I don't have much experience with data merge but the scripting API has an output overset report function. I don't see that in the GUI so it might be easy to script a report. You could ask in the scripting forum.

[Jongware · Accepted solution]

Create a new Preflight profile that just checks the things you are interested in, in this case "Overset text". The Preflight panel shows the overset locations as hot links to their actual position, so it's just a matter of click, fix (the list will update), next, until done.