The first Adobe Indesign Document to print seems to take forever for the print dialog box to appear.

Do you fire up your Mac, launch Indesign and go to print your first document, and just watch the spinning beach ball for over a minute or two?  Then each subsequent print is just normal – bizarre.

Quit Indesign and launch it again and then the same problem, go to the File menu and print and that dialog box just takes a as long to appear but again each time you go to file print after that it’s just normal.

Seems that the issue is the sheer amount of PPDs that Indesign has to load on that initial print command. PPDs are Printer Postscript Description files and OSX ships with an army of them which is great as your printer is probably covered in them but all those extra ones aren’t needed and just bloat the system and make certain programs run slower. When you launch the Indesign print dialog box for the first time it has to read all those files in.

Time to do some spring cleaning and cut down the PPD smorgasboard!

Go to >
Macintosh HD/Library/Printers/

Chuck out any print vendor folders that you don’t have such as Lexmark, Samsung etc – keep the ones that you intend to use, then go into the PPDs folder in the same location:

Go to >
Macintosh HD/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/
Macintosh HD/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/

Here you fill find all those PPDs – probably over a 1,000 odd, time to narrow down and keep the ones you need and delete the rest. Restart the Mac and test your first Indesign print dialog box – should come up much much faster.

If this doesn’t fix your problem or there are other print issues, it may be because the print queues or PPDs or permissions are corrupt try the shareware print repair solutions here, pick the OSX version you need and run the utility.