Weird glyphs

[– Pem –]

I'm attempting to resurrect a few old Quark files that I imported into InDesign decades ago (ID 1or 2). I've dealt with a myriad of problems so far but one just won't go away – weird substitutions for tabs in Minion Pro (an encircled 9), scissors and some other thing in Myriad Pro (in the green chapter blocks). See attached file. I'm trying to believe that just turning off hidden characters will suffice, but I fear that I know better. I ran the old ID files through IDML, then reopened them in ID 2022. Doing so eliminated the problem in one chapter but had no effect on the others. Thoughts? Suggestions? A fix? Thanks for any help you might offer.

[– Pem –]

Wow! The time you gentlemen have been willing to share with me is beyond admirable. Thank you, one and all!

The latest from Chapter 14 is as follows: I've comforted my addled brain by working in Illustrator on what for me is a complex graphic. Bringing it into ID produced a few tussles of its own: my Mac crashed once, then froze upon restart. I rebooted once again and my graphic had reemerged. I went on massaging that page until I was satisfied, called it good and quit for the night. This morning, following a deep dive into Bevi's message, I reopened ID, managed to open V3 of Transmissions instead of V4. And the feathers, darts, scissors and dog? They were gone! I rechecked every version; the same result. Frankly, I'm astonshed . . . but better to be thrilled than nuts! 

A side note: I haven't used a true-type or post-script font since the early 2000's. I moved into Open-Type shortly after I first read about them. But in the late 80's, early 90's, I was using whatever Quark and Apple wanted to dish out (True-Type?).

So hey. Thanks to each of you for your inputs; and thanks for your time.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse · Accepted solution]

A possible corrupt font cache might be at fault. It would be a good idea to clear them from time to time anyway, so give that a go first: if you have a font manager other than Font Book, it may have commands to do this for you, otherwise follow the instructions for clearing caches on this page: https://helpx.adobe.com/ca/fonts/kb/troubleshoot-fonts-illustrator-indesign.html#Delete_the_system_f...

[– Pem – · Accepted solution]

Hi Brad. For now, I will absolutely believe that corrupted fonts or font mapping issues are to blame. I wrote earlier that everything was running fine today, no glitches. But I returned to editing page references within Chapter 14, that led to my opening a file I wrote no more than a year ago, and it had the very same problem we've been conversing about for days. I took your advice and read the link you sent . . . but whenever anybody starts talking about Terminal I cringe and avert my eyes. But that article had its own link – to Font Finagler, a shareware offering that took me longer to download (maybe six seconds) than it did to run. My corrupted files seem to be uncorrupted. Thanks to you, I encountered Mark Douma's shareware, thanks to him, I may well be out of the woods. I'll contact you in a week or so to let you know what happened. Best wishes, Pem

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

Good to hear!  I'm glad you found Font Finagler. Other utilities that can deal with font caches are Cockatil and Onyx, just to mention two more.

Cheers!