Hedging Against Converted File Corruption

I fig­ured out this trick a cou­ple of years ago with the InDesign CS2 beta. Since then, because InDesign con­vert­ed doc­u­ment cor­rup­tion is so preva­lent and insid­i­ous, I’ve been preach­ing the below tech­nique to every­one I know. Thus, you may have already heard about it. Just in case…

When open­ing QuarkXPress, PageMaker, or even ear­li­er ver­sion InDesign doc­u­ments into InDesign CS2, there exists a risk of file cor­rup­tion. If it occurs, you prob­a­bly won’t notice it until days, week, or months down the line. That’s when, all of the sud­den, you’ll be unable to open your doc­u­ment, or unable to print it, or, after work­ing in it for a few hours, find that the Save and Save As menu options have grayed out.

Hedge your bets against future cor­rup­tion by elim­i­nat­ing it from the start. Immediately after con­vert­ing a doc­u­ment from an ear­li­er ver­sion of InDesign or from QuarkXPress or PageMaker, save it as a nor­mal .INDD file. And then go to File > Export, and, at the bot­tom, choose InDesign Interchange for­mat, which forces a rewrite of every line of code in the InDesign doc­u­ment. Now, open the .INX file you just cre­at­ed, and save it back to a nor­mal InDesign doc­u­ment with File > Save As. This new doc­u­ment will be clear of any cor­rup­tion that crept in dur­ing con­ver­sion, and you can safe­ly delete the .INX and oth­er versions.