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Answered

Weird glyphs

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
May 29, 2022
8 replies
4299 views

I'm attempting to resurrect a few old Quark files that I imported into InDesign decades ago (ID 1or 2). I've dealt with a myriad of problems so far but one just won't go away – weird substitutions for tabs in Minion Pro (an encircled 9), scissors and some other thing in Myriad Pro (in the green chapter blocks). See attached file. I'm trying to believe that just turning off hidden characters will suffice, but I fear that I know better. I ran the old ID files through IDML, then reopened them in ID 2022. Doing so eliminated the problem in one chapter but had no effect on the others. Thoughts? Suggestions? A fix? Thanks for any help you might offer.

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Correct answer – Pem –

A possible corrupt font cache might be at fault. It would be a good idea to clear them from time to time anyway, so give that a go first: if you have a font manager other than Font Book, it may have commands to do this for you, otherwise follow the instructions for clearing caches on this page: https://helpx.adobe.com/ca/fonts/kb/troubleshoot-fonts-illustrator-indesign.html#Delete_the_system_font_cache

Hi Brad. For now, I will absolutely believe that corrupted fonts or font mapping issues are to blame. I wrote earlier that everything was running fine today, no glitches. But I returned to editing page references within Chapter 14, that led to my opening a file I wrote no more than a year ago, and it had the very same problem we've been conversing about for days. I took your advice and read the link you sent . . . but whenever anybody starts talking about Terminal I cringe and avert my eyes. But that article had its own link – to Font Finagler, a shareware offering that took me longer to download (maybe six seconds) than it did to run. My corrupted files seem to be uncorrupted. Thanks to you, I encountered Mark Douma's shareware, thanks to him, I may well be out of the woods. I'll contact you in a week or so to let you know what happened. Best wishes, Pem

L

Laubender

Community Expert

Another thing:

If you think, that the entries for the Index are weird, that are special characters that represent Index markers.

Brad already pointed this out! Open InDesign's Index panel and see into the entries there:

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Professional )

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– Pem –Author

Inspiring

Thanks Uwe.

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– Pem –Author

Inspiring

OK folks, I believe I've figured out how to take a screenshot that will actually transmit. I'll let you be the judge . . . As always, I'm very grateful for the time you've spent with me.

L

Laubender

Community Expert

"I still have creepy feathers replacing the space between words in my ID file, but I "solved" that problem by switching off Hidden Characters. "

Hi Pem,

would be good to see a screenshot of your issue. I downloaded and opened both of your InDesign documents with InDesign 2022. Cannot see any issues with the tabs or "space between words".

In one of my tests I substituted the missing font Altemus Dingbats with an old Type 1 version of Zapf Dingbats for Windows. The applied character style of the text where the missing font is used is named "Zapf Block", maybe a hint to Zapf Dingbats in your old QuarkXPress files?

Page 187 without font substitution:

Substituted to Zapf Dingbats Type 1:

Nothing really weird, I think…

Tested with my German InDesign 2022 version 17.2.1.105 on Windows 10.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Professional )

Brad @ Roaring Mouse

Community Expert

By the way, even the current InDesign version can still open old Q v3-4 files. You might try reopening the original Quark file again and see if you get different results now.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

I thought that fell off with CS6 — seem to have seen a lot of threads about people having to work with that version to open QXP files? (Irrelevant to me; I mostly dodged Quark by working in FrameMaker for those years.)

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Peter Spier

Community Expert

That's PageMaker files that are no longer supported, along with newer versions of Quark.

Brad @ Roaring Mouse

Community Expert

Much like converting old PageMaker files, converting Quark files will usually entail some massaging to make it match. What is useful is if you had a PDF of the Quark files as they were, so you can place that PDF on a layer in ID and use as a guide to push things back, assuming an "exact match" is important. For me, as long as stuff is relatively in the right place, it's good enough for going forward with a new iteration. Good luck!

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Never forget Quark was invented by James Joyce, and that weirdness was built right into it.

(Kudos to all who can untangle that... happy three-day weekend!)

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L

Laubender

Community Expert

"happy three-day weekend"

Thanks for that. Had to lecture my students from Friday to Saturday all day long.

And of course we were the only course in the whole building. Creepy.

Best,

Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Professional )

Peter Spier

Community Expert

This is a guess, and that's all it is, but since you say these files are going on twenty years old I suspect it's a case of "bad mapping" where the type designer just threw glyphs into the font willy-nilly and they don't necessarily match the unicode codepoints. Back then we used to also see strange mappings when switching between Windows and Mac flovors of the same font.

As James suggested, I would try a Find/Change, using copy/paste to populate the find field, and typing the correct glyph into the change field.

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– Pem –Author

Inspiring

That's very interesting. In my first post I mentioned having to jump through a bunch of hoops going from Quark to ID. Most of those issues involved reformatting. But your character mapping suggestion seems to me to fit right into that. For now, I'm going "all in" with exporting what I have into PDF. As James Gifford (Nitro Press) said, if it's clean as a PDF then printing it shouldn't be a problem. Thanks very much for your input.

Brad @ Roaring Mouse

Community Expert

As far as hidden characters, I'm not seeing anything unusual. There are Index Markers throughout (as indicated in green on my grab attached), and the glyphs for your Altemus Dingbats are missing (since I don't have the font) and may need to be remapped anyway if you used old Type 1 before and are using an OTF font now, but that would be a simple search and replace.

Can you show a screen grab of what YOU are seeing?

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– Pem –Author

Inspiring

C14_–_Contents_page.indd

C14_–_Contents_page.zip

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– Pem –Author

Inspiring

Thanks Brad. I hope the screenshot comes through this time.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Does manually retyping the content fix the problem? If so, that may be the only fix, with or without search and replace/GREP assistance. In cases like this, there are no settings or options that will fix "wrong text."

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– Pem –Author

Inspiring

C14_–_Contents_page.indd

C14_–_Contents_page.zip