Arial Font issue on 'fl' or 'fi' on printing

[S***@adobeforums.com]

On printing files whose text is in Arial or Arial Greek fonts, where a word has the letters 'fl' or 'fi'together these letters convert to a small outlined box. We have 'auto space' set. The only resolves we have found have been to manually kern where fl or fi appear (impractical) or by sending the file to outline (time consuming as it is not necessary to send our multi page brochures to outline as we are inhouse printing and print straight from native file). Has anyone else encountered this problem or found a way to efficiently rectify it?

[unknown]

It shouldn't be a problem with those fonts, but turn off ligatures and
the issue will disappear.

Bob

[S***@adobeforums.com]

Thanks Robert, I have looked and I have ligatures ticked on the character flyout. So I am just testing that theory and hopefully you have supplyed the answer and it was that simple. Can you tell me however, enlighten me?...... The InD 'help' shows that they are typographic replacement characters for letter pairs fi and fl when they are available in a given font (which obviously Arial is) BUT.... why are ligatures advantageous and when would you use them?

[unknown]

Ligatures simply look better. For instance, instead of the dot over the
"i" blending into the "f" it's not a part of the ligature.

Bob

[Dov Isaacs]

Sam,

I suspect that the real problem is that you are printing with a different Arial font that you are doing your layout with. You didn't indicated how you were doing your printing, but the symptoms sound like you are directly printing from InDesign to a printer that claims to have the Arial font as a printer resident font.

There are two ways around this problem. If you export PDF and then print the PDF file, InDesign will create a PDF file embedding the host-based Arial font that has the proper ligatures and character mapping. Acrobat or Reader will then print that PDF file using the embedded Arial font yielding the correct results.

Alternatively, if you insist on printing directly from InDesign, make sure you check the option to download PPD fonts. The result will be that InDesign will print with the copy of Arial it used for layout, not the crufty copy of Arial (i.e., missing glyphs, possible bogus character mapping) that is resident in your printer.

- Dov