I have an ebook due in a couple of days and I've hit a brick wall. I am working on a 300-page InDesign document that is internally linked up (not cross-references). There are some external http links too. The text was supplied to me in Microsoft Word doc format. I found that InDesign didn't like the links generated by Word and crashed upon epub export. I took me a while to figure that one out. So I had no choice but to manually strip all 1600 links and re-link them, then tested a few pages. Success. This took me 10 days.
Now that I'm ready to export, InDesign is crashing and this time I don't know why. I've removed all styles, all links and all hyperlinked text -- still crashes. I suspect InDesign doesn't like TOC in large documents. The problem is, once you have styled your TOC, you can't delete it! So I've tried copy + pasting a few pages into my old test docs that I know used to export without problems -- and they don't have a TOC. These exported fine, even with new styling and links intact. No crashing. But my original 300-page document is still crashing whenever I attempt to export to EPUB.
So one solution -- albeit a cumbersome one -- is I can move all my content page by page into a fresh document -- with styles and links intact -- and it won't crash. I started testing this with 5 pages, but InDesign does some weird stuff like flowing the text on even or odd pages only and not always letting the content flow onto new blank pages.
I've included a link below to a zip file that contains the working indd and the crashing indd. At this point I suspect the TOC is causing the crashes, but I'm not entirely certain.
http://cl.ly/402G2M410l182D1R1J1v
Things I have tried:
exporting with NO links and NO styles (in case it was a https or & issue) = still crashes
exporting as IDML and then exporting as EPUB = still crashes
I only have a couple of days left, so any help figuring this out would be greatly appreciated!
Nathan