InDesign crashes during adding of pages

Question

Hi,
I´ve got following problem. We design our annual school report in InDesign. In order to keep the required work at a minimum level, we use the document of the previous year, convert it into the currently used InDesign-version and replace the content where necessary. The general layout stays more or less the same.
This year we changed to InDesign CS5 and opened the CS4-document of last year´s report. It was flagged as converted document, so we saved it as CS5-document and the flag disappeared. Till here everything went quite as expected.
Naturally this year´s report differs from the one created 2010 in the matter of needed pages. But every time you try to add pages (no matter how you try to add them) InDesign crashes. So I made another attempt with a new document: everything fine there. Of course we could start completely anew, but that would be a serious lot of work and therefore the very last possibility.
I tried to get the document (or rather InDesign?) working on two Windows 7 x64-systems (one laptop and one desktop), but it worked on neither of them.
Has anybody an idea how to fix this (apart from beginning with a new doument)? Or if the only possibility is starting anew is there any trick or function to take parts of the "old" document to the new one (to save time)?
Thx for your help!!!

Answer 1

chrKaron wrote:
Hi,
I´ve got following problem. We design our annual school report in InDesign. In order to keep the required work at a minimum level, we use the document of the previous year, convert it into the currently used InDesign-version and replace the content where necessary. The general layout stays more or less the same.
This workflow is GUARANTEED to eventually end in disaster, and your day has finally come. At least you can still open the old version. "Recycling" old documents over and over by doing a Save As to a new name and deleting the old stuff leads to cumulative samll corruptions, and eventually the file fails under the weight of too many problems. ID is better than Quark, or especially Pagemaker in theis regard, but it still ends badly eventually.
What you want to do is make a new file. Open the old one and copy the stuff from it that stays the same from year to year and paste it into the new file. Save the new file as a TEMPLATE. Add any styles or swatches you need, and test to make sure you didn't bring in any fatal errors when you pasted from the other doc. Exporting to .idml, opeing that, and saving that version may be even better. For all new versions of the report, open the template, which will give you a fresh untitled copy of the template with everything you need and nothing to delete, and you'll be starting as clean as possible each year.