PDF showing all Hidden Characters?

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
January 25, 2023
3 replies
3966 views

I need to send to my client a 200 page PDF of her book I'm designing with all hidden characters (spaces, tabs, and paragraph marks) visible. Including Non-Printing Objects when exporting as PDF does not show hidden characters. Short of sending screen shots of all 200 pages, does anyone know of a more efficient way to solve my dilemma? Thanks!

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jmlevy

Community Expert

This is not a direct answer to your question, but maybe this can help:

https://indiscripts.com/post/2015/10/indesign-hidden-glyphs-as-a-typeface_

Eric Dumas

Community Expert

That should not be possible.

I would consider an export to MS Word to allow the display of these characters. They don't really exist, they are only a representation on screen of space, line breaks, carriage returns...

Aletrnatively (crazy idea) you could run a Find/Change to replace all spaces with a blue dot, all returns with a coloured Glyph, etc. on a copy of the document obviously. That would export to PDF with the fake non-printing characters. Consider using the 'Conditional text' options before export to keep the 2 versions of your file.

James Gifford—NitroPress

Legend

Seems like that would cause horrid hyphenation, line break and other issues.

My thought is that such level of editing and review detail belongs in the prior step, at a Word or whatever manuscript, and not at the typeset/layout level.