2009/09/29

InDesign CS4 adventures: disappearing text

While editing a book, I regularly export my InDesign files to PDF, for my collegue who does the proof-reading. Today, in one of these PDFs, I noticed something odd and disturbing:


It should be the following:


What was wrong? Even in InDesign CS4 (6.0.4) I could not see anything:



Upon reflection, the problem seemed to start with the "ff" in "offers", which is a ligature, so maybe there was a problem with it. Thus I deleted the first "f", and saw that there had actually been a so-called discretionary hyphen between the two letters, but which was not visible even when hidden characters are shown, precisely because of the ligatures. Only when I turned the ligatures off, the hyphen became visible.


Needless to say, after deleting the hyphen, everything was OK and I obtained the result already shown above. In my view, InDesign's behaviour in this case should be considered as a bug. Anyway, I decided to delete all discretionary hyphens from the document, as they were simply leftovers from the original Word file (should have done that earlier, actually).

2008/10/08

Bloglines

Is bloglines updating my feed? Please ignore.

2007/03/31

Boekdrukkunst

Uit De historische canon van Fokke en Sukke (2007).

Voor educatieve doeleinden als deze te gebruiken van www.entoen.nu.

2007/03/18

Harry Potter schaakt

Nu ja, eigenlijk Ron. Lees hier hoe de scene schaaktechnisch was gedacht (met diagrammen).