For context – link to the original thread: InDesign crashing during export to Reflowable Epub

And how I found solution.

First thought – there must be something wrong with something – some text, Endnote, object on the pages, etc. – some kind of corruption.

So I’ve tried to export just 1st page – without any Endnotes – went smoothly – and that confirmmed my suspicions.

Now – what to do?

How to find source of corruption? There is an option to “split document” by specific Paragraph Style:

But it failed as well…

So, let’s split whole document into separate PAGES – and then try to export them one-by-one.

Of course, separating each page – manually – wouldn’t be very efficient 🙂 so, let’s create a Task that will do that for us – split whole document into separate single-page documents.

But first, we need to load Document’s structure:

Then, right-click on the header of the TYPE column – with SHIFT:

Keeping pressed SHIFT key when right-clicking on the header means “hide everything else but the selected item” – otherwise, user would need to either click “! NONE” then “Page” or uncheck one-by-one every other option on the list.

And that gives us – just Pages:

Next step – right-click on the header of the 1st column and “! Select Visible”:

Now we can load our first Task:

It needs to be run in BatchMode – either forward or backwards – in this case it doesn’t really matter – and it will:

1. Goto Page – based on the page on the list,
2. Move Page – this is a compound rule – in this case – it will automatically create a new / blank document and move page selected in the 1st step to the beginning of this newly created document,
3. As, by default, blank documents will have 1 page anyway, with “undetermined” size – this step goes to the last page in this new document – “-1” argument – and selects this page, Also, becuase those are Endnotes – depends on the settings – InDesign might create additional page(s) to reflow contents of the Endnote(s).
4. This step deletes this empty page,
5. Saves and Closes our new document with moved page.

After highlighing its name – user needs to click FORWARD button – or the next one, BACKWARD:

After a while – there will be bunch of INDD files in the folder:

The 2nd step in this Task – Move Pages – automatically uses original name of the file and adds PageIndex at the end of the name.

So far so good.

Now, we need another Task – that will export every INDD file as a separate ePUB file – but first, we need to load our documents:

So the steps it performs are:

1. will switch to Documents list – for our convenience – EVERY operation that can be performed in ID-Tasker – can also be executed as a rule in the Task,
2. will load all INDD files from specified folder,
3. will filter documents that has been loaded to show only those that have “_” in the name – in this case it’s enough,
4. will automatically mark all remaining results on the list – for our convenience – same comment apply as per 1st step.

This Task needs to be tun using PLAY button:

And the result will be:

Now, we can load 3rd Task:

Steps it will perform on each document – when run in BatchMode:

1. IDT will automatically load document from the list – that is Visible AND marked in the 1st column – will export this open document as reflowable ePUB,
2. this step is no longer relevant – it was supposed to prevent the whole process from crashing / hanging – but it looks like when InDesign hangs on the export – it stops responding and IDT waits for it to end – but never gets the response – so this will need to be solved differently – either as a separate WatchDog application or by adding a Timer and background monitoring event – so for now, the exporting process needs to be monitored,
3. this will close the document – in this case without saving – 4th parameter (columns headers are always updated for the selected rule / step – and as 1st rule is selected – columns headers relate to this 1st rule)

After running this 3rd Task in BatchMode – fwd / back doesn’t matter – we would be getting – almost – something this:

As per the thread, it turned out that the culprit was a WWW address in the 30th Endnote on page “8” – so user needs to monitor the whole process and for now – manually kill InDesign and then restart the process after failed page – to check for more problems.

Re-hyperlinking this address didn’t help – only complete un-hyperlinking – deleting associated hyperlink on the Hyperlinks pallet and living as a plain text was the solution.

---

Download “Finding what’s wrong with failing ePUB export” ePUB_Export_Problem_01.zip – Downloaded 679 times – 797.00 B