One of the more frustrating Leopard-vs-InDesign issues we’re seeing at clients is a bug that causes frequent crashing when using InDesign CS3’s Open, Place, Import, Export, or Save dialog boxes. Designers may also experience these particular symptoms while re-linking graphics as well as printing files.
Until Adobe or Apple fixes this issue, we have an odd work-around culled from various online forums that has helped improve stability at several of our clients:
Possible fix: Do this each time you launch InDesign CS3.
Weird as it sounds, we’ve had several clients report that performing the following steps each time they launch InDesign CS3 has eliminated the frequent crashes their teams were suffering with.
1. Choose File> Print, and click on the Printer button at the bottom of the Print
dialog box.
2. Choose Save As PDF from the PDF button/menu.
3. A Save dialog will appear. You can now press the Cancel buttons until you’re back at your document.
If you are lucky, the crashing problems should go away until the next time you launch InDesign.
What’s causing these Leopard, InDesign crashes anyway?
At the center of this particular crashing problem appears to be a conflict between Adobe InDesign and Apple’s NavSvcs routines in Mac OS X 10.5.1 and 10.5.2. NavSvcs stands for Navigation Services, which are the parts of Mac OS X used when working with files (opening, placing, exporting, etc).
The consensus on many Adobe blogs and message boards seems to be that Adobe engineers are waiting on Apple’s engineering teams for information on the source of the problems and the ways they can be addressed.
You can read more about the history of these issues on Adobe staffer Tim Cole’s InDesign BackChannel Blog:
InDesign & Leopard: Update VII
Source: This weird-but-useful fix comes from a comment by Dennis Quant on a recent InDesign Secrets post titled InDesign CS3 vs. Leopard Status Report. Antidotally, this workaround seems to have improved InDesign crashes at clients such as Creature Advertising and Electric Pen Design in Seattle.
