Hi Marcel

and welcome aboard. This is not expected – a timeout happens when InDesign doesn’t respond in 2 minutes which is way enough time to process all tasks submitted by MyDataMerge.

I’m glad you solved it (and you did it the right way).

Let me explain why so many pages can be an issue in InDesign: If you have a document with 1000 pages or more then its a really large document. Even for InDesign. All of this is processed in the RAM/Memory and at once. Now add some high weight (in terms of file size) graphics on each page and it will happen that InDesign freezes for large documents in the data merge process or doesn’t respond for 30 minutes or more.

We need to seperate two cases:

1 – RAW data merge

If you have just adress labels with text from your data source and nothing else (no text resizing, styling, QR-Code and so on) then InDesigns native merge CAN be the faster solution. In this case you may try the export option (in MyDataMerge) > filetype > “CSV (export and link)” which will create a native data merge CSV file and prepare the merge in InDesign for you. Then you can use InDesigns native data merge very comfortable.

2 – More than raw data in the merge

But once you add fancy stuff like text resizing, styling QR-Codes, Automator actions etc. then InDesign isn’t capable of doing this but MyDataMerge can. But it will take more time than a pure merge of raw data. In this case there are some best practices to get the most out of speed:

• See best practices for layout setup here: https://mydatamerge.com/knowledge-base/best-practices/
• Use the book feature (as you already did) as described in this usecase: https://mydatamerge.com/usecase/indesign-data-merge-thousands-of-records/
  • Side note: Use more documents with less records in a book file. You can still use “print” in InDesign on the book file to print all at once. But it will merge a lot faster

Try to optimize the process according to these best practices and let me know if the merge process got faster.

Additionaly there is a known bug in macOS Mojave when exporting directly to the desktop. If you use macOS Mojave try choosing a file destination other then desktop.

Regards
Pat

Glad we could help. Just let us know if there’s anything else you need to know.