Letter's filling in with gray color

Okay... I still believe this is a RIP error.

Did your printer provide any sort of proof before this went to press? and did this show up then?

Whether or not the errant 0-width stroke has anything to do with it is impossible to determine, but it's the prime suspect. That being said, it certainly doesn't need to be there so ask your client to fix that issue (Is it the same client every time this happens?). You might want to create your own preflight fix-up to find and remove any 0-width strokes in future PDFs in case they forget.

Background: Even with a "0" width, a stroke will always render at least 1 pixel. e.g., I rendered it in PS at 1200 ppi and the attached is the result. You can also see this on the screen in your ID file: If you make the fill "None" but leave the stroke, then zoom in, you will see a 1-pixel line no matter what size. (If you want some real fun, turn on GPU on a Mac! see second attachment!

).

It still might be worth submitting this as a bug, as InDesign should just probably say No if a 0 width stroke is applied. 🙂

I'm curious what happens if you open the PDF in Photoshop as a CMYK document (essentially using PS as a RIP)... i.e. do the weird counters show up there?

It does seem the printer has some setting that is creating the problem. Having a stroke should not give the effect you are seeing. If you are recieving PDFs to place it is good practice to preflight PDF files before placing them in InDesign. Gwg.org have preflight profile for magazine adds (from 2015) that are in AcrobatPro. You can create a hotfolder or droplet to preflight adds. using these.

 

I notice it is not on all counters you get this, so it could be the way that the characters are drawn, and you may find it is more common in some fonts than others. (It can be the font designer that made the stroke in the wrond direction.)

Even on the small letters that are filled in, it's totally random: e.g. not ALL of the lower-case "a"s are filled incorrectly.

If that copy is indeed live text with the same specification, it should have been all or nothing.

I'd say it's a RIP error at the printer's end or a corrupt font.

Can you upload the original PDF for us?

I'm guessing some of the letter insides are accidently filled with a screen of overprinting black, you would not see this when the PDF is viewed in Acrobat if the view overprinting preference is (correctly) set to Always because the green background already has a 30% tint of black. The printer may be removing the overprinting when processing the PDF and causing black tint to replace the green background in some of the letters, note that not all of the small letters are filled in. The error should appear in InDesign when overprint preview is not used and in Acrobat when the view overprint preference is set to Never.

1. First of all: Never outline text in InDesign. Outlining letters are only for graphic purposes, never outline text. NEVER.
2. Outlined letters are compund paths. If it happes, you have to release compound paths and make them compund paths. So the direction of one of them changes, and the next time it changes in another way. Much work for outlined text, but as mentioned, for text it should NEVER be done.

Can you post some photos please?