Acrobat ligatures

[kaiserwilhelm]

My mac - Acrobat 11.0.2
Her mac - Acrobat DC

Offer (ligature out of INDD for the ff)
I see it correctly -Offer
She sees- O=er

She quit Acrobat DC - no better
She restarted her computer - all better.

Thoughts? Personally, if I could nuke every ligature known to man, I would. Time to dig that "get rid of ligatures" script back out of the trash.

 

[Dov Isaacs]

Interesting! This is the first we have heard of any ligature issues. Assuming the font is embedded in the PDF file (InDesign always embeds fonts unless the font doesn't allow embedding), a ligature is no different than any other glyph! In other words, Acrobat is not deciding to apply a ligature or not. It simply has a call to render the glyph specified by the PDF creation application, in this case, InDesign.

The fact that rebooting “fixed” the problem would tend to lead credence to the possibility of there being a MacOS font cache issue that was fixed by rebooting.

No reason to “nuke” ligatures. Unless you are getting PDF without fonts being properly embedded, they are not a problem!

- Dov

 

[kaiserwilhelm]

Dov. This goes back almost a year. We have fought ligatures (as have others on this forum) since CS6 INDD. In INDD preferences - composition - we have now turned on, "Substituted glyphs" to give us a clue when they are going to go bad.
I have $10,000 in rework in the past 90 days due to this. Minimum. I can open a file 30 times. On the 1st time, or the 30th time, the ligature glyphs will substitute with hieroglyphics of sorts. IE, bad characters.
If I restart INDD, all is well.
I just do not see the value to them. They are costing me rework and there seems to be no solution. I have worked with Extensis (Universal Type Server). We have created videos of the situation occurring. I have asked them to get with Adobe to try to find out who this sits with.
Silence.
There are others out there having the same issue. Ligatures going to bad characters within INDD.