How to update line breaks in InDesign?

#1

This is not strictly about Glyphs but I was wondering how others deal with this.

When I update the font files in the Adobe fonts folder it takes a few seconds until InDesign updates them, fine. However, the problem is that it it does not update the line breaks in paragraph setting (assuming I have changed the spacing of my fonts). This is a somewhat new problem. Until a couple of years ago, InDesign did update the line breaks as well (but only if the document was open while the font files were replaced, oh well). Copying and pasting-in-place a text frame usually demonstrates the issue: the line breaks in the pasted frame are different. Maybe that’s an intentional behaviour in InDesign that makes sense in the real world but it is very annoying for type designers.

So, the question is: How to update the line breaks most easily?

My solution is to replace each space character in the open document(s) with a character that is definitely not in the document (usually ` as it can be typed quickly) and then back to space.

How do you do this? Do you know more elegant solutions? Am I missing something? I find it really inconvenient that I have to do this practically whenever I update the fonts.

#2

As far as I can remember, Indesign always kept the line breaks. This is to avoid reflow if slightly different version of a font are installed on coworkers machines.
You can try Cmd+Shift+period and Cmd+Shift+comma. That increases/decreases the font size but should leave you with the same setting as before and update line breaks.

#3

That’s an interesting idea. Does it have any benefits over selecting all (on the page), cut and paste-in-place?

It only works on the selected elements, though – in other words, it’s only simple if you have just a single page. Or, is there a way to select all elements in the whole document (not just the current page)? Our test documents usually have a few dozen pages.

#4

What about changing language of the text? Sometimes it helps me to force InDesign to reflow the text.

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#5

Hey-ho, after a bit of searching I found the magic solution!

Just press Command+Option+/ (slash). Apparently it is known as the “Recompose All Text” shortcut. Not to be found in the menu. Seems to be a well-kept secret. Does exactly what we want, i.e. reflow all text in the document, as far as I have tested.

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