Incidentally if you have a file that is crashing indesign every time and you literally can’t open it, you might want to try Marzware’s recovery service. The IDML file is a backward compatible file that strips out all but the essential stuff, and doing this can often clean out minor corruption issues in an InDesign file which could be causing the problems. One thing worth trying if you suspect that might be the case, is going to File / Export and save it out as an IDML file, then reopening that file and saving it as a standard InDesign file. Sometimes this kind of problem can be caused by corruption in an InDesign file, and this is especially obvious if the crash always happens when you try and open one particular file.

You can also save and then reload things like print presets and document presets by going into them from the file menu and clicking define then saving them.

That way if doing this doesn’t solve the problem you can always restore the preferences. The downside of this is it wiped your personal settings, including document and print presets, so I would suggest synching whatever settings you can to the cloud first to save a bit of time. Personally I find this fixes almost all my crashing issues. After a few seconds you should then get a pop up box that asks if you want to reset the preferences. To reset the preferences simply restart InDesign and hold down Ctrl + Alt + Shift (Windows) or Cmd + Ctrl + Opt + Shift (Mac). In fact personally I find this method has worked almost everytime over many years. Having said that it generally does fix recurring crashes in InDesign (and Photoshop / Illustrator). This does wipe any customisation so if you have personalised workspaces, etc. The next thing which I usually try is resetting the InDesign preferences. It’s worth a go and only takes a few minutes.

Generally this won’t resolve the problem but I have come across situations where it has. OK it sounds kind of obvious, but one thing you could do it restart the computer itself. There are a few things you can do to stop this, other than simply reinstalling InDesign. Whilst InDesign is generally pretty stable I do sometimes come across people who have an issue with InDesign crashing repeatedly.

Indesign mac m1