Words become bunched up in PDF - Adobe Indesign

Viewed on a Mac, how?

Bob

In a quick viewer from Mail. I think the same problems has occurred in Adobe Reader though, as I've had a misprint as a result of this problem before too.

Screengrab of the problem:

<http://i68.photobucket.com/albums/i17/stufart/Kerningproblem.jpg>

Mac's PDF preview is NOT the best way to check out PDFs. If they look
okay in Reader, that's really all that matters.

Bob

In that context, I got an unpleasant shock when I saw one of my web pages on my wife's laptop running Reader 8. The ff
ligature, which occurred twice in the same heading, could only be coaxed to display by careful tweaking of the zoom, and
then not consistently.

Whether it's the small screen display (14.5 in - I think - widescreen), the use of Reader 8 as a PDF helper in Avant
Browser, or what I don't know. There's no problem here on my desktop machine running Firefox with Acrobat 7. But it's
unsettling to know that millions (or tens anyway) of my avid readers may think I publish headlines with holes in.

If anyone cares to test it it's at www.polymer-age.co.uk/back_issues/feb08/s4-5.pdf - the left hand page.

k

It looks ok in Adobe Reader (on a Mac, as well as PC), so it must be a quirk (read: bug) with Mac's PDF preview.

Thanks!

Hi Ken,

Just got your server to respond, and boy is this weird. Acrobat 8 in Firefox, when first opening the file dropped out the ff ligatures in the headline, but opening directly in Acrobat pro was fine. I zoomed in on the initial dropped E which wasn't displaying well, and when I zoomed back out the ligatures were there.

I didn't notice any other anomalies.

I just tried refreshing the page a couple of times in Firefox, and it seems that any change to the view will trigger the ligatures to appear.

Peter

Wow, Spooky stuff.
Firefox - they come and they go. And then they just stay after a while.
?????

Thanks Peter. That confirms exactly what I found.

The commonality appears to be version 8. I haven't got Reader installed on my machines because I believe it's generally
considered risky to have Reader and Acrobat on the same hardware. So I can only see it with my Acrobat which is still at
version 7.

That dropped E by the way will inevitably look odd as it's keylined at only 0.25 pt which works fine in print, but is
pushing credibility for screen display. When I do the next one I may thicken that rule for the web edition.

Maybe I should turn off ligatures as well when I do the web version. I wonder if that would risk copy reflow in the
text. Incidentally, I didn't check at home, but I see there's an fi ligature in the first line of the story
(profitability) and ff 11 lines up from the sidehead in the first column (affiliate). If you've got time, can you see
whether they are a problem or whether it's just in the headline? The text is Myriad Pro Regular and the headline font is
Myriad Pro Bold. Maybe it's a bold/regular discrepancy.

k

Might this odd behavior (which I do not see after viewing a downloaded PDF in Acrobat 8 Pro) relate to the fact that Acrobat reports the Myriad Pro Black is embedded in Type 1 format with a character set described as Custom?

David