PDF showing all Hidden Characters?

[Scott Citron]

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!

[BobLevine]

I thought maybe that could be a thing in InCopy but I don't see it there, either. Sorry, I got nothin'.

[Scott Citron]

Uh, thanks Bob!

[Eugene Tyson]

Bob is on to something - InCopy.

Can you export it to InCopy and then your client can get InCopy and review the document in that - and they should be able to see Hidden Characters? 

It's something like €6 a month, isn't it?

Would it be a possibility? At least you could lock down sections they are not allowed to edit.

[Scott Citron]

Not possible. My client would never go for this kind of solution. 

[Eugene Tyson]

Okey dokey

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

The only possible solution here seems to be a customized font with the white space non-glyphs replaced with symbols.

(I sigh at clients who aren't sure of the boundary between author and designer; if they are so picky they need to see the whitespaces—and not, for example, just the layout results—it seems like they should be up to doing the layout themselves. But maybe that's just me. Or maybe there's a reason.)

[Eric Dumas]

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]

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.

[jmlevy]

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_