square symbol inserted for every instance of letters "FI" when printed

[J***@adobeforums.com]

When I print out certain spreads, there is a square symbol in place of every instance of the letters F and I together (doesnt seem to be case sensitive) I assumed at first that this was a printer issue, but when I brought it up to xerox tech support, they suggested that another user had a similar problem and fixed it by finding a patch on Adobe's site. Has anyone else encountered this problem?

Thanks.

[j***@adobeforums.com]

If it does occur with "FI", then there's something seriously wrong with the font or the printer driver! Perhaps it's "FI" in small caps only? (Now that would indicate a bad font -- not quite totally unheard of, but still a very small chance)..

The sequence "fi" commonly gets replaced by a single character glyph -- the "fi" ligature. If it does look allright on screen (surely you should've noticed if it doesn't), but appears wrong in a PDF or on your printer, you should check if your fonts are downloaded correctly to either PDF or printer.

Known culprits are wrongly subsetted fonts (do you have placed PDFs in your ID document?), weird settings in the Export or Print dialog (change the subset options and see if something changes), or in the Windows printer setup (assert all fonts are downloaded, rather than "replaced by printer font").

Make a single page document, containing text with common ligatures: "Difficult flimflam afflicting floundering files" (or something to that effect). Export the document to a PDF from InDesign and check. Print to a PostScript file, distill it and check.

[unknown]

Make sure to enable download ppd fonts when printing.

The printer resident fonts don't match the font you're using and so the
ligatures are dropping out.

Bob

[j***@adobeforums.com]

If you do not find a patch that fixes your problem, all you need to do is open the document in InDesign and turn of your ligatures. If you are using styles you will need to open each style individually and turn of the ligature option. There is no global option to turn off the ligatures. I ran into this problem with Xerox also. The problem could not be fixed because my printer had an internal RIP that they were not going to develop a fix for. On the newer machines it was fixed on but the older machines there is no fix.

[Dov Isaacs]

James,

Failure to properly print ligatures would not typically have anything to do with RIP processing. Assuming that your "Xerox printer" has a RIP that has Adobe PostScript, fonts in the PostScript stream (or in the orignal PDF file if appropriate) always override any fonts that are resident in the RIP. And for that matter, for PostScript printing, the PostScript printer driver is irrelevant as well since InDesign generates all the PostScript and simply uses the driver to channel that PostScript to the spooler and hence to the printer itself.

As suggested in earlier responses in this thread, the symptoms suggest that the print stream was generated without all fonts embedded (or properly embedded) in the print stream. The original poster (Jason) did not indicate what version of InDesign he was using but there was a problem with a very old InDesign version (possibly InDesign 2.0 or 3.0) in which one of the print dialog's font options did not work correctly and omitted some glyphs from the output stream. That problem definitely was fixed long ago. It is certainly no longer an issue with InDesign 4 (CS2) and InDesign 5 (CS3) in which case make sure that in the InDesign print dialog's "graphics" pane, you set "fonts" to "download complete" (or "download subset") and also enable the "download PPD fonts" option. (If you are using an older InDesign version and having this problem, simply change "download subset" to "download complete" or vice versa - still enabling the "download PPD fonts" option - and see if that solves the problem).

If you are running either InDesign 4 or 5 and still having this problem after making the appropriate print dialog fonts settings adjustment, we'd be very interested in (1) knowing exactly what printer is having this problem and (2) your sending us a simple example InDesign document exhibiting this issue.

- Dov