It’s been 3½ years; has this been “reviewed” already? Work is near impossible because typing is too slow. Even with the most up-to-date version of InDesign and OS.

I have same issue with InDesign 17.3.0.61.

3 styles:
- Text with 2 columns
- Header with span columns 2
- Footnotes

Not possible to work at all.

When I try to turn off span columns on header, it just crash.
But when I turn on again "Span footneos accross columnds" it doesn't crash.

Updated recently to version 17.0.1 and having issues with Footnotes similar to these ones.

Have a story in a document that uses Span Columns for headings and other paragraphs. Text frames for the body text are set at two columns.

I have added several footnotes to the story and after turning on Span Footnotes Across Columns the following happens:

– The whole text editing experience becomes quite slow. I am even presented with a Beta feature called Copy Editor.

– Some settings in Document Footnote Options don't work as expected and applying these don't work across all the footnotes in the document. Ex. Space Between Footnotes and Allow Split Footnotes does not produce any changes.

– Text flow accross columns is poor with several blank gaps above the footnotes in some places.

Removing Span Columns for relevant paragraphs and Span Footnotes Across Columns seems to solve some of the issues. Changing other mentioned settings still won't produce changes though.

I have issues editing text. The file only has 3 pages. (Lots of master file options though) I've tried everything. Restarted computer, re installing InDesign, cleaning up fonts by putting in a different folder, deleting then replacing, my display is set on typical but even on fast it freezes. I resaved. I tried saving as an idml and then an indd. Also, I've got two monitors and one is 4k and one isn't. I've even tried moving the window to the non-4k one and I still have the issues!

Same issue still present in 2021.
Experienced it in InDesign CC 2021 v 16.0.1. Updating to v 16.1 and v 16.2.1 didn't help resolving it either.

It's the first time I wanted to use the "span across column" feature on a long documet 100+ pages with a linked Word file and about 250 footnotes.
Changing anything in that file (I would mostly have to place images with text-reflow), makes InDesign work for at least 20-30 seconds. That's inacceptable.

After extensive testing I realized that using the span column feature on a multi-page content file is unusable. Doesn't matter if its for headlines, footnotes or whatever other paragraph styles.

Decided to change my layout to a single column one, since splitting the Word document into multiple chapters isn't an option because of the footnotes and bibliography which are managed through Zotero.

I'm quite surprised that the span column feature is having such a bad performance.
It's practically unusabale, for anything else than a handful of pages of continuous content.

Turning off preflight, page previews, preview quality, live screen drawing, page thumbnails view and whatever other options I tried didn't make any change at all.

I'm quite shocked that this feature is basically not usable for this kind of layout.

It's definitly not an hardware issue, since everything else is running fine:
Windows 10 Pro x64 20H2 Build 19042.685
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12C
RAM: 64GB DDR4-3200
SSD: Samsung 970 EVO 1TB
GPU: nVidia GeForce GTX 1070 8GB

Same issue here: working on a two columns document with span footnotes terribly slow... Multicolumn layouts are in general very painful since a few versions...

Macbook pro 2020 - 32GB

Still facing the same issue on 16.01. Absolutely horrible. Even word can handle footnotes without any lag. Any news?

Sorry, I forgot to add a screenshot. So here it is.

Oh, and I have turned off most of the options like Page Thumbnails View, Live Screen Drawing is set to "Never" etc.

Same problem with InDesign CC 2021 version 16.0.1, 64-bit (Windows Home x64, version 20H2, build 19042.630)
I have to make a book with 352 pages with more than 1600 footnotes and it is, well, painfull to work with.

Computer: AMD Ryzen R7 2700, 32 GB DDR4 RAM, Crucial 1 TB PCIe NVMe SSD, Radeon RX 550 4 GB RAM.

Problem is still present with release 15.1.1. Like the last comment, it’s making my work impossibly slow…

Issue was fixed with 15.0.2 but returden with 15.0.3. It's making impossible to me to work further on a large academical publication with many footnotes. Please find an ultimate solution!

Any explanation for why upgrading to InDesign 15.0.2 did not fix this bug? Still experiencing very slow performance when using footnotes and span columns.

I have updated to 15.0.2 and I am still having slow performance when using footnotes and span columns. No improvement from before the upgrade.

Thanks a lot for fixing this bug. Checked in old files after playing couple pages work perfectly although it takes time to refresh. But it freezes in long document. Competitors has good features to use footnotes, even Word. They don't freeze like this.. Scary to use footnotes in Indesign.

I have a text flow of only 16 pages. CC2020.

Two columns (left-aligned), footnotes and some titles span columns. No grep styles. It is very slow, but manageable. I'm on an Intel Xeon E-2176M @ 2,7 GHz, with a fast M2 disk and 32 GB of RAM, so you'd think a few pages of text would not be a problem.

If I additionally turn on "balance columns" it becomes so excruciatingly slow at updating that it's impossible to edit the text/formatting normally. The smallest edit, like changing the color of a single character (that shouldn't really cause anything to reflow) takes a 1-2 seconds to update.

I have to turn off "balance columns" to be able to edit somewhat normally, then turn it back on later to see result. This is silly. It's not that complex.

On the other hand, in Adobe Framemaker I have text flows that are hundreds of pages long, full-justified text, hundreds of footnotes, and balance columns. It doesn't even blink even when I do edits that cause all pages to reflow.

Hi Ravi, I've attached a screen capture video of the incident. As you can see in the video, all my footnotes/pages are redrawn even after I toggle off/on the Rule On feature for Continued Footnotes. It takes a good few seconds at the end of the video, but this is what I'm dealing with. I'll see if I can get you a file with this issue, too.

Here's a link to my video:
https://adobe.ly/2CXKyyx

Here's a link to a second screen capture showing a footnote rule that should not be there and doing the same thing to try to reset it: https://adobe.ly/2qT4m38

I've posted more about this issue/related issue here: https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601180-adobe-indesign-bugs/suggestions/39037030-continued-footnotes-rule-redraw-issue-causes-reflo

1. InDesign 15.0 (2020). However, this seems be a hold-over bug from previous versions that has been made worse in 2020.
2. In a long document (a book that I am paging) with lots of footnotes, when I go to Type > Document Footnote Options > Layout > Rule Above: Continued Footnotes and toggle the checkmark for "Rule On," footnotes throughout my document seem to redraw and cause reflow. This causes all the pages I have typeset to reflow out of place. This was already a bug work-around from InDesign 2019 (and previous versions) that I had been using to force the continued footnotes rule above to redraw, since it would randomly disappear from places the continued footnote rule was supposed to be drawn or be drawn in the wrong places above footnotes that did not need a rule above to indicate continued footnotes. (I typically would have a 0.5 pt rule drawn with a width of 6p0 drawn above continued footnotes.)
3. Ideally, there would be no footnote reflow at all and all continued footnotes would obey the settings I put in the Document Footnote Options panel, even after reflowing. I shouldn’t have had to use this work-around in the first page (toggling the Rule On checkbox), but the continued footnotes should work and stay in place regardless of a line drawn above or not.
4. Lots of reflow in the footnotes and thus my typeset pages get messed up and whole portions of my typeset document reflow as a result of shifting footnotes.

This is still broken in ID 2020. And there seems to be a new bug introduced where when you try to toggle it off and then back on to fix the continued footnotes, whole text boxes seem to redraw and reflow. Very bad for long documents!

What I personally feel the lag is due to large number of footnotes with span column. In my file with 86 footnotes with more than 2-5 lines of text in each footnotes. While editing text first couple of page, Indesign crashes and seems it's unable to reflow the rest of text as footnotes also effects on editing text.

My file contains lots of inline table, images and paragraph shading boxes.

so what I did is split the files in 3 sections and it works perfectly. Gets irritated while finalizing the file for delivery.