Lucida Sans troubles in InDesign

[derkberry]

I have what I'm sure is a simple problem but its very specific and any help I could get would make my life much easier so here we go. I am having troubles with the TTF Lucida Sans. When used in InDesign on this machine (my PC) displays the font properly and exports to PDF but does give me an error saying "this font could not be embedded due to restrictions in the font file." However this is not my problem ( I don't think, if might actually have something to do with it). Either way the main problem is that the font displays correctly in InDesign and in Acrobat and also prints propperly from this machine. But when it is viewed and printed on and from any other machine in every case where there are certain characters together a "square" is displayed. This happens every time when "st" are together for instance in the word "start" and the same with "ff" as in the word "staff". I've also noticed this in "fi" and "fl" words where those characters are put together. If one or the letters are capitalized then it displays them properly such as "Flow". And it does this cross-platform. I have both a Mac and a PC in this office and I always just open the docs up in Acrobat Pro on the Mac and edit the "boxes" out. I have tried creating PDFs using this same from on this PC with Word and the font works properly on other machines when displaying those PDFs so the problem is in InDesign. I can't find any other information and I know it will be a while till our Tech guys dig anything up as well. Please point me in the right direction as to what is wrong. Thanks.

-db

[MD]

ff and fi are common ligatures - maybe you subset the font and did not embed the whole font file? Check your pdf settings.

[derkberry]

I am sure it is not InDesign confusing it with the ligatures, I don't have them put in as ligatures. Which still doesn't explain the "st" creating a square. Its so frustrating this problem. Possibly just reinstalling the font? Other apps use the current files just fine so its InDesign who is being the bad guy here.

[MD]

InDesign will automatically substitute the proper ligatures in, and as far as I know there is no way to turn them off. Since no other application that I know of has this feature it would explain why the font works fine in other applications but screws up in InDesign. Try creating a new style and suppress ligatures, then export to a pdf. I am pretty sure that it will work. If not you could always convert to outlines before creating the pdf file.

[jimking]

I have seen this before, happen to me in our workflow at work. These were pc files sent from a mac (G4). The problem fonts were zapt dingbats and times. With Times I would get boxes instead of letters when I sent the file straight to the rip. To fix it, I printed it to our Apogee workflow to create a normalized pdf--pristo. The dingbats were different. When viewing a pc file on the mac using Indy sometimes the dingbats view as boxes, just like the Times font. To fix it I chose a different zapt dingbat and--pristo! Why it does this is something I haven't figured out.

[PrintDriver]

To turn off ligatures all you have to do is go to the Character Palette, hit the tip arrow and uncheck Ligatures. It's on by default. (InDesign v2 and CS)

[Bear]

as PD said, it's here:

http://www.play-nicely.co.uk/downloads/IDLIG.jpg