*** From the Archives ***
This article is from September 3, 2010, and is no longer current.
Bug Bites InDesign CS5 Type on a Path.
A recent post in Adobe’s User to User forum complained about a problem with PDFs exported from InDesign CS5. The issue was occurring with type on a path having characters randomly dropping out of the PDF. Adobe’s Matthew Laun got involved, asked the poster for a test file and confirmed the behavior. He also discovered that it was happening with soft returns. Remove the soft returns and the PDF exports just fine.
I was able to confirm it myself as you can see by the screenshots from InDesign CS5 and the resulting PDF below:
Everything appears normal in the InDesign file. But notice that hidden character at the end. That’s a soft return.
Type drops out in PDF
As you can see, Acrobat is fully aware that something isn’t right and in this case it’s pretty obvious what that is.
While I’m not a fan of using soft returns, there’s no debating that this is not intended behavior and will hopefully be fixed in a future dot release. Luckily this is one bug that’s very easy to work around.
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Wow! Oops. (For those who don’t know, a “soft return” is a Shift-Return/Enter, also called a forced line break.)
I think I can offer a little insecticide for this bug. When you create the type on a path, try setting the margins by clicking and dragging with the Type on a Path tool. This makes the PDF come out fine for me in almost every case.
Type on rectangular paths is no problem, even without setting margins.
The only time I can make it fail is to have type with soft returns on more than one path with curved segments and not set the margins.
Don’t forgey that the auto-hyperlink is also still there: hyperlinks with hyphens etc. break into two brijen links with this new CS5 function..
Geez auto correction on a Dutch iPhone. It should read:
Don’t FORGET
and:
Into two BROKEN links
There’s more bugs in Type On Path.
One nasty one, but on the other hand quite uncommon one is this.
If you have a bezier curve (or any path) with text on it. Then, start deleting points with the direct selection tool… When there’s only one point left…. Fast quit to desktop. => Crash…
Now, it’s not the most common way, deleting objects having type on path by removing point by point. But still, it’s a crasher.
Also of note is that soft returns don’t show up as anything in XML. Print-to-web users beware.
Yes, soft returns actually appears in the XML as the unicode character “unicode line separator”, which a lot of software (primarily older browsers) choke on.
There is an extension to this issue that is driving me crazy. When I export to pdf a document that contains “type on a path” objects, they show up in the pdf, but not when the pdf is as the source for commercial printing. The entry is blank. How can I embed the “type on a path” in the InDesign document prior to exporting to pdf?
Can anyone offer some help on converting text on a path to outlines? It removes the space setting used to make text more legible. FYI, I always convert feature text to outlines to avoid font issues.
I know this is old, but I’ve never come across this bug before. I couldn’t figure out my problem until I found your post. Thanks very much – it was really helpful.
I converted my master page text to outlines as a workaround.