Is CS5.5 IDML a bug?

Question

Hi All,
While opening 5.5 IDML file in CS5/4 InDesign quits. This happens in xml and non-xml documents, sometimes InDesign get hangs with showing progress bar. Even I have waited for more than an hour and its waste of time. Have anyone faced this problem before or is it a bug in cs5.5?
thanks
Jaswin

Answer 1

OK, I had some time to look at this, and I'm afraid the problem is not simple.
It is highly correlated with XML, though, so please do answer the questions I asked.
I think you will need to get comfortable looking inside IDML files in order to make good progress here. Remember they are just .ZIP files. You can unzip them, edit their contents, and zip them back up.
I spent a while examining your 00.idml file. Like all IDML files, designmap.xml is the overall index to the document, and it defines what portions are present.
Your designmap indicates that there are 46 stories in your document. That seems like a lot for your 3-page document, but OK.
It turns out that commenting out the first story is sufficient to make the IDML file open. That is, editing the designmap to look like this, around line 133 and following:
<idPkg:BackingStory src="XML/BackingStory.xml"/>
<!-- <idPkg:Story src="Stories/Story_u3079.xml"/> -->
<idPkg:Story src="Stories/Story_u3057.xml"/>
<idPkg:Story src="Stories/Story_u3010.xmxl"/>
<idPkg:Story src="Stories/Story_u2c62.xml"/>
It's curious that it is the first story.  Opening the resulting IDML file is interesting. Itl ooks like your document is actually the same, but there is some slight text reflow, and it fits on 2 pages instead of 3. I find that quite surprising -- I would have expected an entire story to have disappeared, and that did not seem to happen.
Of course, this doesn't exactly tell us what the problem is. To do that, we need to look inside that story file.
I haven't spent a lot of time looking at IDML files with a lot of XML-tagged content, but the 3079 story file looks basically like this:
<idPkg:Story ...>
  <Story Self="u3079" ...>
    <StoryPreference OpticalMarginAlignment="false" .../>
    <InCopyExportOption IncludeGraphicProxies="true" IncludeAllResources="false"/>
    <XMLElement Self="di2i105" MarkupTag="XMLTag/outline" XMLContent="u3079">
      <ParagraphStyleRange AppliedParagraphStyle="ParagraphStyle/Chap outl 2">
        <CharacterStyleRange AppliedCharacterStyle="CharacterStyle/$ID/[No character style]">
          <XMLElement Self="di2i105i1" MarkupTag="XMLTag/ce%3alist">
            <XMLElement Self="di2i105i1i2" MarkupTag="XMLTag/ce%3alist-item">
              <XMLElement Self="di2i105i1i2i3" MarkupTag="XMLTag/ce%3apara">
                <XMLElement Self="di2i105i1i2i3i4" MarkupTag="XMLTag/ce%3alist">
                  <XMLElement Self="di2i105i1i2i3i4i5" MarkupTag="XMLTag/ce%3alist-item">
                    <XMLElement Self="di2i105i1i2i3i4i5i6" MarkupTag="XMLTag/ce%3alabel">
                      <Content>1.</Content>
                    </XMLElement>
                  </XMLElement>
                </XMLElement>
              </XMLElement>
            </XMLElement>
          </XMLElement>
        </CharacterStyleRange>
      </ParagraphStyleRange>
    </XMLElement>
  </Story>
</idPkg:Story>
Now, if you comment out the <ParagraphStyleRange>...</ParagraphStyleRange>, it still crashes. But if you comment out the enclosing <XMLElement> as well, it does not.
So, it's not an issue of the particular content of the story, but rather the fact that it is XML tagged, and perhaps how the story is used. It's a lot less obvious to me. I suppose you could comment out the MarkupTag attribute, I didn't try that. But looking at XML/tags.xml, there is nothing too interesting about the outline tag.
Oh, another observation is that your document does not validate against the DTD in the structure pane. That could be related.
I suppose one could also open the appropriate Spreads file and fiddle with the TextFrame that is associated with Story u3079. See if associating it with another story works better. Looking at that frame casually, I don't see a real problem with it.
Also, much of the stuff in story u3079 is duplicated in story u6ee. I'm not sure what that means, but it seems like it might be related to the problem -- accidental duplication of an object?
I bet, also, we could explore more with the scripting DOM if we really got excited.
Hopefully this helps you get started!! Still waiting on some context/answers to earlier questions, though.