BASIC PREFLIGHT INDESIGN INSTALL
BASIC PREFLIGHT INDESIGN PRO

This can be found by choosing Edit > Preferences > File Handling. (I don’t know whose fault it is, Adobe’s or the add-on developers’, but they’re just buggy as heck.) One person reported that turning off the “Auto-activate Adobe Fonts” feature that activates fonts inside graphics helped a lot.

BASIC PREFLIGHT INDESIGN INSTALL

You know I dislike all the font management auto-activation plug-ins and recommend people not install them. I’m fine with the gray bounding box if it means InDesign works faster! Plug-ins (Font Activation) Otherwise, you just get a gray bounding box. The Delayed option is how it worked in CS4 and earlier: If you click and hold the mouse button for about a second, then it kicks in to “Patient User mode” (where you can see the effect take place as you drag). If you get stuttering or slow-downs when you move, resize, or rotate objects, then you should definitely consider setting the Live Screen Drawing pop-up menu to Delayed (in the Interface area of the Preferences dialog box). I don’t know for sure, but it sounds as though their x-ref technology is more robust than what Adobe came up with.

BASIC PREFLIGHT INDESIGN PRO

A second option is to look at the Cross-References Pro plug-in from dtptools. That is, just open all the files whenever you’re going to be editing one of them. Now, that’s not possible for everyone, so here are two other options: First, it sounds as though having all the documents of a book open at the same time can help. I personally think something is deeply wrong with the way Adobe engineered the whole cross-document thing, and I tend to think that cross-document referencing and linking should be avoided until it’s fixed. This doesn’t surprise me because I’ve also seen problems when hyperlinks span across documents. This is another example of “Adobe says it shouldn’t slow you down, but people keep coming up with examples that suggest it can.” The biggest problem, as far as I can see, is x-refs that span from one document to another. Probably the most notorious offender causing slowdowns in InDesign is the Cross-References feature. You can disable it by double-clicking that little green or red dot in the lower-left corner of the screen, then turning off the On checkbox in the Preflight panel that appears. I almost always leave it on, but if you’re running into slowdowns, it’s definitely worth turning it off. But there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that preflight can get in the way. Adobe insists that Preflight only works in the background when you’re not working, so it should not slow you down. If you have created a custom preflight profile, then it may be looking for lots of different things. InDesign is constantly looking at your document to see if there are any “preflight errors,” such as overset text. Normally, on a reasonably fast machine, those shouldn’t slow ID down, though. InDesign also has other display modes that could potentially slow it down: View > Proof Colors, and View > Overprint Preview. You can disable those from the Display Performance submenu.

If you’re working in Typical and it still seems like one or more images are in high-quality mode, then those images may have display quality overrides applied to them. Obviously, the higher the quality, the more InDesign has to think and the slower it’ll become. There are three main display modes in InDesign: Fast, Typical, and High Quality (under View > Display Performance). (That’s 50 GB for a 500 GB drive!) InDesign relies on your drive because it writes to the “scratch disk” when it runs out of RAM (this happens far more than you’d expect). Common wisdom says keep 10% of your drive free. Hard drive space can also be a cause of problems, especially if you’re working on a nearly-full drive. I would never try to run InDesign on a machine with less than 2 GB of RAM, and I’m forever cursing that my laptop with 8 GB is not enough (but I’m also constantly running 5 to 10 programs, often including Photoshop, Illustrator, and Word). If you don’t have enough, it will be sluggish or even die. There are many reasons why InDesign might be running slowly, but here’s a quick rundown of things I would try in this situation, more or less in the order I would likely try them. Every little action has about a 5 second delay! It is not my computer, it is specifically inDesign. I am working on a brochure (40 pages, about 180 images).

Basic preflight indesign