Weird ligature issues

[welchp]

I work at a printing company and we do prepress on InDesign CS5 print jobs. We have ran into a type problem that we would like to know if others have had and if there is a preventative solution for. We've had two InDesign CS5 jobs develop this strange problem in the past month.

If automatic ligatures are turned on (and they are invariably), certain letter pairs will swap out with single glyphs as if they are ligatures despite the fact that they should not be ligatures. Once you turn automatic ligatures off, the pairs go back to the way they are supposed to be (but, all your good ligatures go away as well).

Here is an example:

In the document I have currently, the pairs ek and eh convert to the ligature glyph fi and the > symbol. Thus, if I type "seek behind", you would get "sefi b>ind". Turn off the automatic ligatures, and the problem goes away.

This problem is particularly insidious in that there is no warning for it. You load up the fonts, you open the InDesign file, and the pairs have changed themselves since the last time it was opened. If you aren't looking for it, you will not notice that it has changed.

Has anyone seen this problem or know what causes it? What preventative measures can be done to keep it from occurring other that manually turning off ligatures on all text in all InDesign jobs?

[Peter Spier]

Never seen this, but I haven't looked, either. Is this restricted to a particular font?

One workaround might be to use find change to insert a non-joiner between the two characters.

[welchp]

The first time we encountered it, the document was using Formata Condensed. The second time we had the problem, it was Adobe Garamond Pro, like you will get from owning Creative Suite.

Both times, we had to turn off ligatures to make the problem go away. I think it may be related to corrupt font caches (as a printer, we see a lot of people's fonts in a day). We are running Macs and we use FontNuke regularly to keep font caches fresh and uncorrupted. Still it could be cool to know what causes the problem, and what we could to to prevent it from occurring.

"One workaround might be to use find change to insert a non-joiner between the two characters."

This sounds like a great way to repair the problem without removing the "good" ligatures.

[welchp]

We've had another one of these issues pop up. I am going to post a PDF of this on our website:

http://www.wpcrds.com/index.php/blogs/55-weird-adobe-bugs/83-eh-a-ek-replaced-by-ligatures

We can only get this to occur in InDesign CS5 on Macintosh, on a machine with a corrupt font cache. We have not been able to repeat it on the same machine with a corrupt font with InDesign CS3. Open the PDF on the website and check out the sticky notes in it.

Everywhere the letters eh and ek occur, ID CS5 replaces them automatically with either a strange symbol or an "fi" ligature. If you turn off ligatures, the problem goes away, but so do the good ligatures.

This is a problem that I don't think most users will run into, as they tend to have one set of fonts they have purchased, loaded, and use commonly. We are a printing company and we are loading client's collected fonts all the time, and so we will have lots of opportunity for corrupted font caches.

I would like Adobe to analyze this and discover what the difference was between CS3 and CS5 that caused this error to occur. Even with the presence of a corrupted font cache, I could not get CS3 to have the same problem. Thus, it must be an ID CS5 bug. This bug has wasted plenty of money so far. Please look at it and address the issue.

[Peter Spier]

You're talking to other user like yourself here, not techsupport or the engineers for ID. To file a bug report, go to Adobe - Feature Request/Bug Report Form

[welchp]

Thanks!

[John Hawkinson]

Err, if you want any feedback or want anything more than the hit-or-miss might-fix-it-but-might-not, you'll need to open a support case. http://adobe.com/go/wish.

[Mattwbrt]

Wechp,

This is similar to the issue we are having we get hn changing to Ú  or Ÿ

Did upgrading to cs5.5 fix this issue or are you still having the problem?

We also run cache cleaners before every job but this seems to pop up still.

Thanks

Matt

[Peter Spier]

Matt,

Your symptoms look to me like they may be casued by some third party pugin or other conflict. Do you have any non-adobe plugins installed? Font manager?

[Mattwbrt]

Peter,

We are not using any font managment tools at present.

We are placing a font folder for the jobs into the application>Indesign cs5 > fonts folder

before we load the fonts to this location we clear the .ist file out as well as clearing the system font caches.

see the below post I placed else where

I have been having an issue with Indesign and PDF files

We are getting font character "Glyphs replacing other characters"

Specs of the machines

Mac OsX=10.5.8

ID version=ID-CS5 ver 7.0.3

Acrobat Distiller version = 8.0

Fonts we have had this issue with

Sabon LT Std.

Garamond MT Regular

Fairfield LT STD

TimesLT Std

Palatino LT Std

Minion Pro Regular

Verdana Italic

Times New Roman PS

Characters that have been causing the issues.

io, il, hn, SY

The characters they are replaced with.

Ú Ÿ Õ Š Ỳ §

We run font cache cleaners such as Font Nuke, Font smasher and we even created our own from information found in other places where all the font cache's hide as well as suitcase's.

We tend to catch this issue in out PDF files we are actually but it does show up in the Indesign file, but you can close indesign and then reopen it and the issue is gone.

This lead us to believing it was a system font cache issue.

We process many jobs on a given day via 3 different machines that are setup to create PDF files.

We have a Process in place that before every job we clean the font cache and restart the machine.  Now I do not know if people are following this procedure all the time but we do have this issue appear like every 3 weeks when we get more work going thru the workflows.

I am looking for other Solutions to what this could be, would upgrading to cs5.5 help solve this issue? Could it be Indesigns Preference file getting bashed as well?  How can I better search for these characters.

We have been finding new characters it has replaced so its not always the same characters one time it was

joŸ =john

joÚ =john this was the latest.

Thank you for any responses.

[Peter Spier]

I've been watching the other thread, too.

I don't think this is a genal problem with ID or the fonts as most of these I recognize as high quality fonts and ones in common usage. I would expect genuine bugginess to show up in may more posts about the problem. It's also VERY strange to me that you are getting glyph substitution on two-glyph combinations that are not standard ligatures, and the behavior where the problem disappears if you restart InDesign all point, in my opinion, to some sort of system-specific issue.

Replacing the prefs is certainly an easy task, and one worth trying if you haven't done it already, but be sure you do it right. See Replace Your Preferences

[Mattwbrt]

This is what we thought as well some more history of the Problems.

We discovered the problem back in July

We orginally were running the following systems

Mac OSX 10.5 and ID-CS5 ver 7.0.0.355

We did not have this issue with CS4 jobs.

So we decided to do some upgrades in steps and we kept having the issue

Mac OSX 10.5.1 then we went to  10.5.6  and now we are 10.5.8

When we still had issue we changed Indesign ID-CS5 ver 7.0.3

We also purchased a new Machine this has

10.6.4 and ID-CS5 ver 7.0.4

At present the common issue seems to be Indesign Cs5 and what ever revision number. Our Next step will be to do an upgrade to cs5.5 to see if that has fixed the issue.

Message was edited by: Mattwbrt Changes OS 11.6 to 10.6

[Peter Spier]

I understand the problem is manifesting in InDesign, but t5hat doesn't mean ID is the source of the problem. What ELSE do you have running in terms of browsers, utilities, plugins, and so forth that is common to all of these installations?

[David W. Goodrich]

I've been following this thread because ligature weirdness would drive me nuts.  I may be grasping at straws, but I did notice that in the other thread ("Please help me to sort out this problem") there was brief mention of "AdobeFnt13.lst", "AbobeFnt13.ist", "AbobeFnt12.ist".  I assume the IST for LST swap is a simple typo in adding to that thread, but, quoting Peter from October and CS5.5 ALL "the adobefnt**.lst files (where ** stands for a two digit number)" need to be deleted while Adobe software isn't running, followed by re-starting the Adobe software if not the operating system.  I had to do this recently for the first time in many months (to get IDCS4 under Vista to recognize a font style) and zapped a few dozen adobefnt**.lst files.

David

[Mattwbrt]

Peter David,

I think we are going to try to add to our Cache cleaning and AbobeFnt13.lst clearing to kill the current Indesign Preferences and replace it with a clean version.

I recall back in the day of Quark when we were a Quark house we would have to replace Quark Preferences since they would become corrupted.

It is a very annoying issue and we are working on ways we can detect the issue so we do not loose a client because of this problem.

We run PDF compares we try to look for the main characters it tends to swap out too.

I am trying to figure out how i can set something in indesign to run and check to see if this issue is in the job before we create the PDFs for the job.

Yes we are grasping at straws.

[Mattwbrt]

I found this post in another forum which does lead one to think the issue is related to Indesign

http://http://www.graphicdesignforum.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-59656.html

Now I am wondering if it can be a combination of issues that can create this problem.

I am trying to force a job to create this problem for me so I can examine it more.

So at this stage I am thinking I need to upgrade to cs5.5 and hope this issue was fixed.

I am also investigating how we set these jobs up that it has happened too if we picked up designs from older versions of Indesign what is common in all the jobs.

[David W. Goodrich]

I needed to edit Mattwbrt's link to work: http://www.graphicdesignforum.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-59656.html>, axing the doubled http and a space near the end.  And though I haven't seen these problems (CS4) I'd really like not to have to worry about ligatures.

David

[John Hawkinson]

So at this stage I am thinking I need to upgrade to cs5.5 and hope this issue was fixed.

"Upgrade and hope" is never a good strategy. Adobe offers free 30-day trial downloads.

Use them and remove the Hope from your equation...

[Mattwbrt]

Update,

I was able to get John as up as  JoÚ in the file all over the place.

1. )    The JoÚ was being treated as an actual ligature, I could search for John and it would find the JoÚ.
2. )    I turned ligatures off in the paragraph style and it reverted to John I then went and turned ligatures back on and it changed back to JoÚ
3. )    Further testing I have a machine that does have Indesign Cs5.5 on it we tried to replicate this issue on that machine so far it didn’t happen.
4. )    I also tried it on another machine with cs5 setup like the machine I have tested and have yet to produce the issue yet. Both machines are identical setup same OS same Indesign.

It’s a buggy issue but it is something to do with the ligatures in Cs5 as far as I have been able to deduce.

We are either going to try to upgrade all of our machines and work to Cs5.5 or we may only apply Ligatures to words with fi or fl's, or use the fi ffi ffl and fl caracter glyphs in jobs.

• The font is Adobe Garamond Pro Regular.

[Peter Spier]

Waht language localization are you using?

[Mattwbrt]

US English

Yes i had double checked that to make sure my Machines were all using the same Localization and same Hypenation dictionary.

We are all using US English.

[Jongware]

Is the language applied to this text also English? Some ligaturs are language-dependent.

(Another test would be: if you can replicate this issue, what happens when you change the applied language?)

[Mattwbrt]

Yes it is English text.

We were finally able to replicate it on another machine, loading and reloading the same fonts to the Adobe font location.

one thing of intrest we are noticing is that our OpenType font folders have

A PDF file talking about the font and then we notice a .dstore file that stars with the "%" character followed by a random number.

We open the Adobe .lst file and the list defines the pdf with a %begin font and even the dstore

I am wondering if Indesign is getting messed up since the PDF and this other file which is normally hidden are being defined as Fonts in the .lst file.

Our next step we will make sure these files are not in the font folders.

[niegocki]

jumping to 5.5 won't solve it - ever since we upgraded to 5.5 I have been getting the same ligature problem you are describing. The strangest part about is that the letter pairs are fine, but they change once it is reopened, and not always the first time. Sometimes it is the 5th or 6th time of opening the file when they make a shift. Looks like I'll have to leave ligatures off for the time being, unless I want to quickly scan every document for random oddball characters.

[Mattwbrt]

Niegocki,

Thank you for the Information about cs5.5

Can you put a bug request in as well to Adobe.

My issue is we can't tell our clients that they can't have ligatures in their files. So now we are going to create a grep style to apply ligature to only selected character pairs like fi, fl, ffi, ffl, Th and what ever other ones they will need.

Could you post the specs of your machines that this happens on?

So far no one has had this issue in CS4?