Weird end of lines when exporting to PDF

[Jorge de Buen]

See that S at the end of the third line? It happens sometimes on hyphenated words when converting certain documents to PDF. Let’s say that it happens two or three tiemes in every hundred pages or so. I first saw this problema some three years ago. Does anybody know what is happening here?

[Steve Werner]

If it only happens in that one document, you could try saving a COPY of the file as an IDML file to possibly eliminate corruption. File > Save As > InDesign CS4 (or later) [IDML]. Then open the file again in InDesign and see if it works.

[Jorge de Buen]

It happens everytime I work on this specific magazine, that is twice a year. I haven’t detected this bug when exporting other documents, so far. The problem does not show on InDesign, only on PDFs made with InDesign. To solve it, I use to insert a discretionary hyphen in the same place.

[Willi Adelberger · Accepted solution]

When you go to the settings of your paragraph style in the section finetuning: Did you select an Adobe World Composer? If so, change to Adobe Paragraph Composer. 
It will change and improve the hyphenation algorithm in English and all western Languages. 
If you have text in RTL languages like Hebrew, Farsi, Arabic and other languages, turn off to export tagged PDF. Use the world composer only in paragraphs with RTL elements. When text with World Composer AND Tagged PDF is exported, this problem happens. 

I have reported this bug several years ago, but it was never repaired. 

[Jorge de Buen]

I need to use the Adobe World-Ready paragraph composer. This is a magazine for translators specialized in medicine. Sometimes it mixes Arabic, Hebrew, and other RTL languages in the middle of Spanish, English, German, French, and many other LTR languages.

And... you are right! Turning off "tagged PDF" solves the problem. Nevertheless, this is a real bug.

Thank you very much.

[Eugene Tyson]

Can you share a sample document and your PDF settings?

I've never seen this - could be a language thing.

[Jorge de Buen]

Sure. Thank you for your help.

See: PDF, page 49, first paragraph, second to last line.

[Peter Spier]

Quite strange. it isn't happening with all htyphens, or even all cases of hyphens occurring at r-s breaks.

I tried export to .idml to see if that makes a differnce, but with missing fonts the type re-flowed and that break disappeared so no joy.

I did look for more info on the Minion 3 font in use, and it seems to be an OpenType conversion from another format, which might be a factor, or might not. Also, the Basic Paragraph style has a 5 pt baseline shift built in for no reason I can see, but removing it also causes the text to re-wrap. Issuing a Recompose All Stories command similarly changes the line endings.

In the file history it seems to have started life in version 16 in February of 2022, and there was a crash and recovery early on which could have caused some corruption. Not a lot of recent changes to the content, apparently, apparently, but many re-paginations as other files in the Book were edited.

Do you see this same problem anywhere else? I copied that text from the PDF into NotePad and it sees it as PerS, not Per-

I'm thinking it might be a good idea to go ahead and run this through .idml as recomposing the stories doesn't seem to affect the overall length of the document (no overset text or blank page) and see if you conmtinue to have issues with strage hyphenation if there is no good reason not to recompose (any edits you make after opeing in a new version will recompose the story anyway, so it's not like this may not happen during the course of work anyway).

[Jorge de Buen]

Yes, it’s strange. It occurred only one time in the 96 pages of the last edition (before unselecting “Tagged PDF”). In other editions it has occurred roughly three or four times. Each issue of the magazine involves around a hundred pages.

The problem is that such an error force you to review line by line every time you export the document.

As for the Minion 3 issue, what a surprise. As far as I know, I have it activated within Adobe Fonts.

The baseline shift (5 pt up in this case) is the only way I have devised to get a proper aligning of the images while making good use of the baseline grid. I can’t believe that in 2023 Adobe still hasn’t realized that the images shouldn’t be aligned to the baseline. Images should start and end at the interline, as always.

I usually open an article from the last edition, delete the content and save it as a new one. Not the best practices, I guess, but with this very project I find it difficult to handle templates. For instance, this last edition has articles in Spanish, English, German, and Catalan; some of them with inserts in Chinese. There are tables, figures, insets, all kinds of titles… For every new language I must create dozens of styles. And I’ve deal with around 20 languages so far.

As I said before, unselecting Tagged PDF solves the problem, but I guess this is not the way things should be.

Thanks a lot. Your kind help, guys, has saved me hours!

[Laubender]

@Jorge de Buen said: "And... you are right! Turning off "tagged PDF" solves the problem. Nevertheless, this is a real bug.

Thank you very much."

Hi Jorge,

this bug is well documented for some years now.

And the solution, if you still need the "Adobe World-Ready Composer", is to turn off "tagged PDF" in the Adobe PDF Export (Print) preset.

What a drag! Especially for accessibility.

Related forum threads:

Automatic hyphens randomly have letters in them
bracewell4213, Jul 20, 2021
https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign/automatic-hyphens-randomly-have-letters-in-them/td-p/1218946...

Random character superimposed on hyphen
Pascal Garin, Jan 29, 2021
https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign/random-character-superimposed-on-hyphen/td-p/11792704

Please support the following bug report at InDesign UserVoice and vote for fixing the issue:

PDF Hyphenation Bug when line has cross-reference, hyphenated word, and option is to create Tagged PDF
Sonny Rafael, February 13, 2019
https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601180-adobe-indesign-bugs/suggestions/36835285-pdf-hyphenatio...

Possible workarounds:

[1] Use the Adobe Paragraph Composer instead.

[2] Disable "Include PDF Tags" in the PDF export settings.

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Expert )