character/letter drops out in eps from Indesign CS3

[tlotzer]

We had a weird occurance... every letter "b" disappeared in two separate text boxes on the same page from an Indesign CS3 page ripped through Rampage. Opening the eps in Illustrator showed the missing letters. The adjacent letters after the "b" did not close up as if you deleted the "b". It just left an empty space in place of the "b".

I remade the eps on a different machine and it worked OK. Not sure if it was the original machine, Indesign, a fluke.

Any thoughts? Never seen this in 20+ prepress years.

 

[upekkha]

Re: character/letter drops out in eps from Indesign CS3

sounds like a font file problem
try dumping the font caches and/or rebuilding the font with a font manipulation utility like TransType or Fontographer (do they still make this?)
you could outline the block of text in InDesign

 

[amanda]

Re: character/letter drops out in eps from Indesign CS3

Not sure if this is correct, but it sounds similar to a ligature problem I was having some time ago.

Whenever I had a lowercase *f* next to a lowercase *i* and created either an .eps, .ps or even .pdf file, one particular PPD I used would convert this to a *?* character. For example, the word "Office" would become "Of?ce" and other various pieces of punctuation would dissapear.

I'm not sure how you have created the eps file??
or if the font you are using has ligatures which incorporate the letter 'b'??

But for me, I found that the problem was one of my PPD's which couldn't handle ligatures and converted them with no font warnings or anything. Now I avoid using that particular PPD and things are fine. Also as Rich said - convert to outlines for a quick fix while you sort out the problem.

Hope this helps.
Amanda

 

[oxburger]

Re: character/letter drops out in eps from Indesign CS3

I initially thought it might be ligatures as well, but can't think of any instances where every letter b would be a part of a ligature. In fact, I can't thing of any instance where the letter b would be part of a ligature. But you can still try turning them off and re-generating your pdf.

 

[maxon]

Re: character/letter drops out in eps from Indesign CS3

Yes we had a similar problem some time ago when ripping PDF files coming from INDD CS3 on our harlequin, some wingdings characters disappearing from final output. Turned out it's a common problem with most rips, harlequin and others as I was told, very fussy with fonts especially CID encoded ones - re-generating the suspect fonts in Fontlab or Fontographer didn't solve anything. We upgraded to harlequin v.8 and everything is fine now.