12 Replies Latest reply: May 13, 2011 5:37 AM by confused_again RSS

    Very strange anomaly in PDFs generated from InDesign CS5

    confused_again Community Member

      This is going to take some explaining, so bear with me. I have a bog standard InDesign file, same as every other file I've handled since we upraded to CS5. The file features lots of text in a 2-column format, which has been styled using a defined paragraph style sheet. On generating a PDF of the file for printing, a couple of random chunks of text (as in about two-thirds of one line in separate places) appeared to be bold. Initially, I assumed it was because they were in 4-colour black (it had that kind of appearance), but rechecking the file showed that the text was clean - the only thing was that the paragraph style applied had been deviated from slightly by the application of a different tracking value. So nothing there. As the original source of the text was a placed InCopy file, I also extracted that and viewed its XML, again, it showed no obvious differences applied to the text that appeared bold. Cleaning the paragraph style in InDesign, however, (alt shift click) resolved the problem.

       

      Wanting to know more, I took the PDF into Illustrator, and there the reason for the bold text became obvious. Those sentence fragments had the same letters repeated and pasted over the top three or four times. Even more interesting, if in InDesign I changed the format from 2 to 3 columns (thereby forcing the text to reflow), the PDF worked perfectly. Switching back to the 2-column format made the problem come back again.

       

      Now I have never seen anything like this, and I am stumped as to what might be causing it. I can't see what might have been applied to the text in InDeisgn to generate this as an outcome. Has anyone got any ideas???

       

      Here is a screen shot of the text in the PDF:

      Shot1.png

      And here is a screen shot of the text in Illustrator, showing the repeated characters that were tacked up to create this effect:

      Shot2.png