InDesign spell-checker helpless

Forum|Forum|8 months ago
August 10, 2025
2 replies
191 views

Hi all,

Lately I have been experimenting with converting PDFs to InDesign layouts.

Whether I export the text from Acrobat Pro to Word to InDesign...

or whether I open the PDF into InDesign so that the new feature can convert it back into a .INDD document, ...

I see this problem a lot: ligatures like fl and fi become single glyph characters in InDesign and the spell-checker has no idea what the word is. Try to right-click and it guesses very badly. That makes for a lot of manual spell-check fixing for every word with fl and fi all across many pages.

Anyone seen this? Is there a cure for it?

Bug

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

My personal cure for that kind of thing is a very long, carefully groomed input file for the FindChangeByList script. In Latin script it's comparatively easy to do this, as the decomposition of each ligature glyph should be unambiguous. I haven't needed to change my input file since 2010, it seems.

Probably this substitution is something that the native PDF-to-INDD tool should be able to do, though.

Mike Witherell

Author

Community Expert

Hi Joel,

True, a Find/Change can find these fused glyph ligatures and trade them out for f-l and f-i (and not sure if others are also happening). Somehow, though, if the translation engine can see these ligatures, it should change them back to text properly. I see this as a bug; or at least a fault.

Mike Witherell

Abhishek Rao

Community Manager

Hi Mike,

Thanks for sharing the details of what you are seeinus better underg. To help stand and investigate this with the team, could you share one of the sample PDFs where this happens along with a short screen recording showing how the text appears after conversion and how the spell-checker is interpreting it? This will give us a clearer picture of the behavior and help in finding a possible workaround or fix.

Looking forward to your update.

Abhishek

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