What the Heck is Going On in These Text Frames?

Sometimes I turn to a page in an InDesign document and I just stop, staring at the screen, wondering what on earth is going on. What could this thing I’m looking at be? It’s a text frame, sure, but it doesn’t make sense.

For example, today I opened a document and saw something akin to this:

I mean, hey, what is that big red dot doing between the second and third line. It’s obviously part of the drop cap. I think. Maybe. But I can’t select it, I can’t get rid of it, and it was frustrating the heck out of me until… I turned on Preview mode. It goes away!

Now some of you will know what it is right away. And that’s okay. Because sooner or later you’ll be faced with some weird text frame thing that the person next to you understands, but you don’t.

It took me a good minute or two to realize that the red dot was an unwarranted and unneeded space character after the I. And Hidden Characters are visible. See all the other tiny red dots where there are spaces? This one got “blown up” because of the drop cap.

Here’s another fun one that stumped me for a moment:

Why would someone fill a text frame with a bunch of red dots, seemingly randomly placed? But they, too, disappear when I turn on Preview mode or Overprint Preview. Yup, you got it: they are also space characters and Type > Show Hidden Characters is enabled. Where’s the text? It’s colored Paper. Oh, that tricky Paper color! It fools me more often than it should.

In the past, we’ve written about other weird things, such as the disappearing paragraph rule, and the text that disappeared right out of the frame. I also wrote up a list of some of the hidden characters you can see from time to time.

Then, of course, there are the oldies but goodies, such as the line line of a paragraph that has the wrong leading:

The culprit there, of course, is usually the invisible return character, which sometimes gets different leading applied accidentally. (This happened in PageMaker all the time, too.) That’s why I like turning on the Apply Leading to Entire Paragraph checkbox in Preferences.

And here’s an oddity: I clicked on this text frame multiple times, but where’s its frame? Why can’t I seem to select it?

We talked about that one in an earlier podcast: The text frame color accidentally got changed to White! So the frame is visible… but not on a white background! Grrr!

Oh, there are so many strange and unexpected things that can happen in InDesign. That’s why it’s so important that people become good not just at laying out pages, but also in thinking like a detective — look for clues, such as changing the various view modes, and use those little gray cells!