Repair a damaged InDesign Document
A damaged document can wreck anyone’s day. Especially if said document is your only copy and you need to send it to the printers yesterday. Yes, its nobody’s fault but your own that you didn’t save multiple copies and didn’t save a copy to disk but reflecting on the past isn’t going to help you now that your deadline is fast approaching.
Some documents are just too damaged to open. In that case make sure you use this experience to learn a valuable lesson about backing up and protecting your needed data. Luckily, in most cases, a damaged document is not the end of the world and is actually fairly easy to fix. Adobe even has a help file for the subject of damaged InDesign documents. The only trouble with this tech doc is that the solutions aren’t listed in an optimized way and it fails to take into account one of the best new features of InDesign CS3.
There are several reasons why your document could be damaged; poor conversion from Quark, Pagemaker or earlier InDesign version, electrical surge or most likely a poorly thought out workflow. It doesn’t really matter how the document got damaged what matters is that it is damaged and you need to change that in a hurry. Here are the go to, quick resolutions, for resolving you damaged document issues.
1. Export to the InDesign Interchange format (*.inx) and reopen. This converts the document to XML, allows the previous version of InDesign to open it, strips out the plug-in information and in general does a nifty magical clean up.
2. Save AS, When you save a document over an existing document not only do you not back up what you’ve done but you save little bits of extraneous data. Remember that time when you placed in graphic after graphic until you found one that seemed to work? Yeah, that info is still in the file. That is, until you do a ’save as’.
3. This is the big one and the most glaring flaw in Adobe’s tech doc on the subject, it’s buried at suggestion #9. Move pages over to a new document. In CS2 this was easy for small documents; simply drag a page from the pages palette and drop it into a new document. Like Indexing a document this does an amazing job at document level repair. The only issue being that this must be done by hand and can get tedious with very long documents. InDesign CS3 changed all this. Now it’s as easy as opening up a new document, going to the pages panel in the original document and choosing ‘move pages’. Select ‘move pages’ 1-(your last page) over to the new document and BAM you’re golden.
These three steps will take care of 90% of any document damage issues and can be done in seconds. Next time, back up and save often but for now.
Happy repairing.
July 17th, 2007 at 11:52 am
I had a corrupted document. When I scrolled down, the page kept on scrolling for 20 seconds. The workspace seamed endless, and the document was unmanagable.
I’ve tried the interchange tip and it worked just fine!
This tip saved me 2 weeks work!
Thanx!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
July 17th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
@Tim -
Awesome! Glad we could help. Let us know if you have any more trouble =)
August 3rd, 2007 at 8:55 pm
#3 worked perfectly, thanks
February 5th, 2008 at 11:04 am
Hi, there. HELP!!!
I’ve got an error code 5 and I can’t open the file at all…
There are absolutely no saved data files at all.
I am using an Intel Mac and InDesign CS3 trial version.
I have lost many hours of effort and in my rush, I did not save a copy of the working file.
Oh please help me if you could.
Thanks! =)
March 18th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Hi Admin,
Can you please HELP me??
I’ve got also error code: 5 and there is no copy of document. I cant open it anyway..
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:50 am
i have a major problem.
i am on os x 10.5.2, using InDesign, 5.0.2.
i have been working on an indesign document all day, then i went to package the document as a way of backing it up. i set it to overwrite an older copy of the document’s package. i got a message saying that the package didn’t work, so i deleted the package folder and emptied the trash so that i could try and package again. but when i returned to InDesign, the file was not longer open. InDesign was still open, but my file was not. it turns out that the file i had been working on was in that packaged folder i deleted! and it let me delete a file that was in use! which i have never experienced before.
so i didn’t lift a finger, went straight to data rescue and scannned hard drive for deleted files. it found 50 .indd documents, but InDesign will only open about 10 of them, none of which are my lost document. it says simply that they can’t be opened.
is there anyway to rebuild these files to try and find my lost file?
any ideas?
thanks.
carter
July 30th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Большое спасибо автору. Возможно, в будущем я и действительно реализую подобную затею.
August 8th, 2008 at 4:33 am
You saved my life. Seriously. I was prepared to try all three… #1 worked like a dream. Thanks so much.
August 17th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Actual topic. Writing is worthy of attention.
August 25th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
I’m confused by your suggestions because they all sound like you’re talking about a damaged document that actually opens in Indesign.
Ever damaged InDesign document I’ve run across does not load into indesign. In fact I get the error code 5 message and then indesign also shuts down.
So…am I reading the suggestions correctly…are these for documents that are damaged but still managed to load?
August 26th, 2008 at 6:34 am
Well, same here, error code 5 with damaged files and nowhere any info on if and how to recoverable those files are! Would be great if there was any useful info on that error code to try and avoid those corrupted files…