Could anyone please provide some general advice about working with multi-page tables in InDesign, which appear to be very unstable.
Over the past year or so, my team and I have worked with InDesign 5 and 5.5 on both Mac (10.6) and Windows (XP and 7) machines. In that time we have found if there’s one thing that will cause InDesign to crash it’s a table that runs over several pages and particularly (though not exclusively) if it’s got merged cells. Add that extra row, merge that extra cell, even just insert your text cursor as you prepare to change some text and InDesign seems to reach a point where the “straw breaks the donkey’s back” and it falls over. At least it usually has the courtesy to reopen at exactly the point where the crash occurs with all the other changes that have been made still in place, whether they have been manually saved or not.
The really weird thing is that sometimes the same file will crash on all the machines at the same point (as you would expect) but sometimes the files which crash on Windows machines will work fine on Macs and the files which crash on Macs will work fine on Windows machines. There doesn’t appear to be much of a consistent pattern to what’s going on.
However, the solutions are always the same. First, unmerge any merged cells and adjust the border/fill commands to hide the fact they are now unmerged and then, if that doesn’t work, split the table up into separate chunks and put them into a separate text box on each page - that always seems to fix the problem, although the benefits of linked text boxes are now lost.
I’ve had a scoot round the web and on these forums and whilst I can find quite a lot of material on this topic, there doesn’t appear to be anything that relates to our issue directly. I realise that I haven’t given specific information on what happens to us because it’s just something that happens every so often and we’re usually working so fast that there’s no time to carry out a detailed analysis of what’s going on, we just fix it and carry on. I’d be grateful if anyone could offer a general overview of what’s happening and maybe suggest some preventative measures we could take to reduce/eliminate the chances of this happening in the future.
As always, thanks in advance for any and all advice offered.