I wanted to complain about the fact that I cannot open an ID-file created in 2011 using an 2021, just updated program (16.1-version), even though I need to pay for it a lot. I am working as a volunteer for a non profit organisation that operates worldwide. I am translating materials. Our organisation is small so it takes time to do the translations. How dare you change the systems so that I have less than 10 years time to benefit from the files that others in Europe have created. I think this is pathetic and greedy. Now I need to take time to recreate the template for myself that I could have got ready from our central office. This is so stupid and wrong. And by the way, it did not help to save the file as a idml-file and open it again. Why is it that updating programs always causes so much extra work for your customers? So annoying and frustrating.

InDesign Server 2021 Windows Edition (16.x)

We had several indd files that had a Paragraph Style listing a font that was not actually used anywhere in the document (no text in the file was using that font.). In other words, the Style said it used "font a", but there was never ANY text actually using "font a" in the file. "Font A" is a non-system font that was installed on the desktop. If you load the indd file in InDesign Desktop, no errors occur, and Preflight says there are no errors, as expected.
If you remove the file from the desktop, and then open the indd file in InDesign desktop, you still get no errors and no preflight errors, even though the font is defined in the Paragraph style.
If you then use COM to control InDesign Server (windows edition), and tell it to load the indd file. InDesign Server will lock up. No errors are shown on the console or event log, IDS just LOCKS UP..
If you package the indd project and tell it to include document fonts, it will not include the font defined in the Paragraph style unless text using that font is actually in the document.
I don't think InDesign Server should LOCK UP in this circumstance.

We had this happen with some 60+ indd files, and it took a lot of trial & error to determine what actually CAUSED the lockup.

To reproduce:
1) Use InDesign Desktop to create an InDesign document.
2) Define a Paragraph style using a font that is NOT installed on the InDesign Server.
3) Define a text frame using that Paragraph style. Do not actually put ANY text in the frame.
4) Save the InDesign document.
5) Use COM to bind to an instance of InDesign server APPLICATION object (called "app" in this example.
6) Use the APPLICATION instance to open the indd file in OpenCopy mode ((InDesignServer.Document)app.Open(<filename>, InDesignServer.idOpenOptions.idOpenCopy)
InDesign server will never come back. It locks up.

If you edit the indd file and change the Paragraph style to be a font that is actually installed on IDS, then the open returns an instance of the DOCUMENT COM object as expected.

SETUP

• IDS Server 14.0.3.433 running on Windows Server 2019 (build 17763.864)




• Local connection using "sampleclient.exe"




• Two test scripts (attached):
  Slow script: "adobe-ids-win-slow.js" (approx 275 KB in size)
  Fast script: "adobe-ids-win-fast.js" (approx 275 KB in size)

PROBLEM

There are two scripts to compare. They are both of identical size, does nothing but declare a variable and return a string value. However, while execution of one of the scripts take a fraction of a second, the other script typically runs for > 10 seconds before completing.

TESTS AND OBSERVATIONS

1) This takes excessive time to run (typically 13 seconds on my test machine):

   C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop>"c:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe InDesign CC Server 2019\sampleclient.exe" -host localhost:8190 c:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\adobe-ids-win-slow.js

   Script result (std__string): Done

2) This completes quickly (typically in less than 0.1 seconds):

   C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop>"c:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe InDesign CC Server 2019\sampleclient.exe" -host localhost:8190 c:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\adobe-ids-win-fast.js

   Script result (std__string): Done

3) Adding the "-server" flag to the slow test will make it run fast, since the script isn't passed via SOAP but instead evaluated directly from local disk. This tells me the parsing of the ExtendScript statements isn't slow in itself so the difference seems to lie in the SOAP request handling.

4) Now a really weird part: removing the very first space (before the comment on line 1) in "adobe-ids-win-slow.js" makes it run almost as fast as the fast script when repeating test 1) above. It turns out that "adobe-ids-win-slow.js" MUST start with a / /-style comment in the very first byte to run fast; adding the space back, or removing the comment completely, makes it evaluate slowly again. I've tried other tokens such as semicolon, //-style comment, curly brackets etc but none had the same effect.

5) In contrast to the change in 4), adding spaces before the comment, or removing the comment entirely, from "adobe-ids-win-fast.js" makes no difference in its evaluation performance.

6) Another strange discrepancy is that even when "adobe-ids-win-slow.js" is modified to run fast using the change described in 4) above, the speed is still slower than the "adobe-ids-win-fast.js" variant. They both declare a string of same length but the data INSIDE the string is different, but while "adobe-ids-win-fast.js" completes in < 0.1 seconds the modified "adobe-ids-win-slow.js" takes closer to a full second.

7) All of the tests above run at good speed (less than a second) when connecting to IDS 14.0.2.324 on macOS (tested with Catalina 10.15.7). The minor difference in speed between the slow and fast scripts seen in 6) is still present though, but is again eliminated if the "-server" option is used.

OTHER COMMENTS

I tried running Microsoft's Windows Performance Analyzer to capture what the slow IDS is doing during the long wait. I found that the overhead is located in calls from AFL (Adobe File Library) to the NT kernel, but without debug symbols I couldn't pinpoint it in more detail. My totally unconfirmed suspicion is that gSOAP/2.7 (as returned in the "Server" HTTP header in IDS connections) is applying some content sniffing to detect encoding, data format or other properties of the inlined script, but why this would only take place on Windows is a mystery, and it's also odd that the initial code comment would short-circuit this and improve performance dramatically.

I've also tried disabling various Windows Security settings (Firewall, Virus & Threat Protection, Exploit Protection etc) in case that was interfering with network I/O but I've not found any improvement in that area.

The slowness is not inherent in "sampleclient.exe" either since the root problem was first observed using our own HTTP client, as was the weird workaround of adding the comment string. I'm just using "sampleclient.exe" here to set up a self-contained test case.

The attached IDML test case (also applicable to CC15/18 clients) enters an infinite recompose loop directly after opening. The second text column repaints continuously. This in itself doesn't directly block interactive use of the InDesign client since recomposing is a background task, but as soon as one tries to save/export the document to disk the application hangs (most likely waiting for a stable document state).

It's notable that the exact placement of the small text frames containing arrows are a necessary piece of the puzzle. Moving them outside of the main text column stops the recompose loop, but then moving them back to their original position will bring back the problem.

Our use case of opening/processing/saving this document (or rather more complex variants of it) on InDesign Server is therefore entering a state where IDS consumes 100% CPU and never completes the action, thus creating a serious disruption in the workflow.

I have not been able to reproduce the problem with CC19 (I tested 14.0.2.324), but CC15 (11.4.1.102 and .105) as well as CC18 (13.1.0.76) all show the same behavior. I'm using macOS 10.14.3 and our IDS runs on various older macOS installations (10.11.6 is one of them).

I'd be thankful for some input on the following questions:

– Is CC19 fixing this problem by design or am I just lucky to not trigger a similar bug there for now (i.e. the potential risk remains)?

– Any chance of a fix be distributed for CC18 or CC15 in future Rapid Release builds?

– Are there any preconditions in the document that we can change to avoid the buggy code path altogether? E.g. any frame/style/document property that we can instruct our customers to avoid and thereby be safe?

Don't hesitate to ask for more details if needed.