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welchp
Participant
February 15, 2011
Question

Weird ligature issues

  • February 15, 2011
  • 22 replies
  • 39453 views

I work at a printing company and we do prepress on InDesign CS5 print jobs. We have ran into a type problem that we would like to know if others have had and if there is a preventative solution for. We've had two InDesign CS5 jobs develop this strange problem in the past month.

If automatic ligatures are turned on (and they are invariably), certain letter pairs will swap out with single glyphs as if they are ligatures despite the fact that they should not be ligatures. Once you turn automatic ligatures off, the pairs go back to the way they are supposed to be (but, all your good ligatures go away as well).

Here is an example:

In the document I have currently, the pairs ek and eh convert to the ligature glyph fi and the > symbol. Thus, if I type "seek behind", you would get "sefi b>ind". Turn off the automatic ligatures, and the problem goes away.

This problem is particularly insidious in that there is no warning for it. You load up the fonts, you open the InDesign file, and the pairs have changed themselves since the last time it was opened. If you aren't looking for it, you will not notice that it has changed.

Has anyone seen this problem or know what causes it? What preventative measures can be done to keep it from occurring other that manually turning off ligatures on all text in all InDesign jobs?

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    22 replies

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    welchpAuthor
    Participant
    May 24, 2011

    We've had another one of these issues pop up. I am going to post a PDF of this on our website:

    http://www.wpcrds.com/index.php/blogs/55-weird-adobe-bugs/83-eh-a-ek-replaced-by-ligatures

    We can only get this to occur in InDesign CS5 on Macintosh, on a machine with a corrupt font cache. We have not been able to repeat it on the same machine with a corrupt font with InDesign CS3. Open the PDF on the website and check out the sticky notes in it.

    Everywhere the letters eh and ek occur, ID CS5 replaces them automatically with either a strange symbol or an "fi" ligature. If you turn off ligatures, the problem goes away, but so do the good ligatures.

    This is a problem that I don't think most users will run into, as they tend to have one set of fonts they have purchased, loaded, and use commonly. We are a printing company and we are loading client's collected fonts all the time, and so we will have lots of opportunity for corrupted font caches.

    I would like Adobe to analyze this and discover what the difference was between CS3 and CS5 that caused this error to occur. Even with the presence of a corrupted font cache, I could not get CS3 to have the same problem. Thus, it must be an ID CS5 bug. This bug has wasted plenty of money so far. Please look at it and address the issue.

    Peter Spier
    Community Expert
    Peter SpierCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    May 24, 2011

    You're talking to other user like yourself here, not techsupport or the engineers for ID. To file a bug report, go to Adobe - Feature Request/Bug Report Form

    W
    welchpAuthor
    Participant
    May 24, 2011

    Thanks!

    Peter Spier
    Community Expert
    Peter SpierCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    February 15, 2011

    Never seen this, but I haven't looked, either. Is this restricted to a particular font?

    One workaround might be to use find change to insert a non-joiner between the two characters.

    W
    welchpAuthor
    Participant
    February 15, 2011

    The first time we encountered it, the document was using Formata Condensed. The second time we had the problem, it was Adobe Garamond Pro, like you will get from owning Creative Suite.

    Both times, we had to turn off ligatures to make the problem go away. I think it may be related to corrupt font caches (as a printer, we see a lot of people's fonts in a day). We are running Macs and we use FontNuke regularly to keep font caches fresh and uncorrupted. Still it could be cool to know what causes the problem, and what we could to to prevent it from occurring.

    "One workaround might be to use find change to insert a non-joiner between the two characters."

    This sounds like a great way to repair the problem without removing the "good" ligatures.

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