Strange text rendering errors.

[wjpycc]

I've been working from home on PC during the pandemic, and now I'm back in the office on the Mac and having a number of problems with any files I worked on at home.

1. Opening files in Mac, there are lines of text where there are no spaces between words. I've had to go through and redo almost everything I've done in the last few months.
2. Changing the colour of text now alters the spacing/size. 
3. Opening a file that was previously locked results in text changes that break the flow of the document.
4. Copying text and pasting it on a new page in the exact same place the text renders differently than how it was copied (it'll be on additional lines).

The files almost have a mind of their own. Is there any fix for this? 

[Migintosh]

Some details will help.

1. What version of InDesign, and was it the same version on Mac and PC?
2. What Mac and Windows OS versions?
3. Did you use Open Type fonts?
4. If they were OT fonts, did you use the same font files (like from a packaged ID file), or just fonts of the same name?

Those questions aside, have you tried doing a Save-As or a trip through IDML to clear out any extra data? Make sure you keep clean copies of your PC files in case you have to start over at the Mac.

[Randy Hagan · Accepted solution]

The information Migintosh has requested will help us sleuth what may be causing your issues with cross-platform InDesign documents. Especially where it applies to the fonts you use for the jobs.

But working from a lot of experience of moving InDesign documents across the Windows and Mac platforms, it may not be so much that any of your InDesign documents have a mind of their own so much as your fonts may be of two minds, depending on their respective platforms. In fact, the specific issues you describe are common with Postscript Type 1 fonts across platforms — the copyfit near universally gets looser on the Mac platform, custom hyphenation and justification (H&J) spacing goes wonky, and clicking into a text frame frequently — but not universally — reflows.

A tell-tale indication of the issue will be in your Control panel, which may show in it's type character iteration that the font name is in brackets, [fontname], which means the exact font isn't available on your system, even if you have the same font name installed and activated on your Mac.

Since you're work system is set up for the Mac platform, I'd suggest you consider dealing with the circumstances and just readjust the job(s) to be compatible with your work systems. It stinks, but this lets you use the tools available to you to adapt your work from home to the company workflow. But as Migintosh offers, if given the option you should use OpenType fonts with the cuts/typefaces you require in the future to preclude these issues in the future. OpenType fonts are specifically designed to be used on either platform without (well, generally) problems going back and forthe from PC to Mac.

Hope this helps,

Randy

[Luke Jennings3 · Accepted solution]

2. Changing the colour of text now alters the spacing/size. 

I've never seen that before. I suggest you go back to your PC and make sure InDesign is fully updated, then package all your InDesign files. Update InDesign on your Mac, clean your font cache, then unzip the packaged files.