On InDesign CS6’s Undo problems under OS X 10.11

Since the update to OS X 10.11 (which, incidentally, I prefer to not call by its silly sounding nickname), InDesign CS6 displays slightly odd behaviour that probably results from the interaction of Adobe’s and Apple’s code. To whit: you may find you can’t undo more than a few times.

Here’s a new document with a text frame that I filled with placeholder text:



That’s two operations: drawing the frame and filling it with placeholder text, so at this point, the top of the Edit menu looks like this:



Now let’s go make some changes to the text frame — I’ll just delete a couple of things in different places, so that each is a separate “undo”-step and I end up with this:


Now let’s click Edit → Undo a couple of times and see what happens:



I can undo the typing, as you’d expect — good. Let me do that and look at that same menu again …



… WTF? I can’t undo anything more, even though so far I’ve performed at least four actions in this document! It’s not always that you can only go back a single step: usually it’s two, and I seem to recall I’ve also found it limited to three. Regardless, it doesn’t happen immediately every time InDesign is started: typically it crops up after working with it for a while, but that could be anywhere between several minutes and several days (if you don’t quit the app and put your computer to sleep when you’re done for the moment).

You may also notice in the screenshots above that the Edit menu has changed: there’s a separator bar at the top that wasn’t there before, indicating something more is going on than just the Undo functionality not working correctly. No idea what, though.

Other Symptoms

This lack of Undo isn’t the only minor bug that working under 10.11 causes in InDesign CS6, but it’s the one that will probably cue you in that this problem has occurred most often.

I’ve so far noticed two other related bugs. One is that the text frame you’re working on suddenly goes blank. If you continue typing, the line or paragraph you do that in might just suddenly reappear while the rest of the frame stays blank. I wanted to include a screenshot of this, but naturally, InDesign refuses to oblige no matter what I try just now.

The second is that if you keep working with InDesign for a fair while, it may throw up a message window that says it’s out of memory. All you can do at this point is click the “OK” button and the application will quit.

Workarounds

If you search the internet for this problem, you’ll find you’re not the only one suffering from it. Some of the solutions proposed involve resetting InDesign to its defaults, but I tried that, and the problem simply kept occurring. In addition, it causes the annoyance of having to again adjust the app to your preferences — better save your workspace (menu Window → Workspace → New Workspace…) before you do this, for example.

One workaround is to just live with it and manually undo your work instead of letting the app do it for you. This is doable for the short term, like if you’re just doing minor editing on a bit of text or moving an image around, but not great if you’re about to make major changes to your document. Similarly, if the text box goes blank you can get it to redisplay its contents by going to another page and back (⌥⇞ immediately followed by ⌥⇟, for example)

The only solution I’ve found that actually solves the problem is to quit InDesign and restart it, then re-open the documents you were working on. Not ideal, but it’s guaranteed to restore full undo functionality — until the problem re-occurs, anyway.

Ideally, Adobe would release a fix for this, but I doubt that’ll ever happen: they want people to use the current CC version rather than the older CS versions, as that presumably makes them more money from subscriptions than they can from selling applications. I figure that they figure that a bug like this might just be the incentive to get a few more people to switch to CC. So, it seems that if you want a permanent fix for this problem, the only recourse is to stay with (or re-install) OS X 10.10 or earlier.