Make a copy of your document first, then try this troubleshoot:

Select all text, then:
1. Paragraph->Turn on hyphenation
2. Character->No Break (uncheck).
3. Character Styles – are there any applied? You may have to disable them
4. Copy and Paste text into WordPad and Save as Plain Text. Copy and Paste back into your InDesign file.

Nicole, since you only have 16 pages, you should just Export a PDF, make a 16-page Facing Pages Document (or an 8-page 11×17), then Place all the PDF pages in a zig-zag pattern to create printer spreads. This is super-fast if you have Keyboard Shortcuts for Align to Page.

View post on imgur.com

This is how prepress production used to do things in the olden days (and still do sometimes).

There are lots of imposition plug-ins out there, maybe someone can recommend one. (professional ones are really expensive)

Niels, those are Reader Spreads, which do not represent how a printer would actually print a booklet.

Nicole, I don’t know anyone who uses the InDesign print booklet feature. As you can see, it doesn’t work very well. If it’s a small piece, I just export the PDF and place in an InDesign spread like this: https://i.imgur.com/Cu6L5CO.jpg (If you have bleeds, you need to pull in the insides, since there are no bleeds on the inside of a booklet.)

Basically, imposing from a PDF is the way to go. If you just want to print it, Adobe Reader/Acrobat has a booklet option.

There are many PDF imposition plug-ins out there (some for InDesign), maybe someone here can recommend. (Sorry I haven’t used any of these recently to know)

From Adobe:
One such set of Acrobat plug-in products are Quite Imposing and Quite Imposting Plus (available for both MacOS and Windows) from Quite Software https://www.quite.com. Another similar product is PDF Snake (Windows only) available from https://www.pdfsnake.com.

Otherwise, when you are searching, “imposition” is the word you should use.

Dieter’s fix is the way to go, but it is industry standard to have odd pages on the right. It may not matter for you document, but:

If your 2-sided document has tabs, they will be inserted before the first page of a section. If an even page is the first page of a section, it will appear before the tab. This is bad.

In a case like yours, typically a blank page is inserted so that Page 1 is on the right. Everyone at a print shop from prepress to bindery will check to make sure the odd pages are on the right. If you are having these printed, tell your printer that you are intentionally putting odd pages on the left. (Most people do this in error.)

Also!

Find->Replace->Query->Remove Trailing Whitespace

You may have spare Returns in those.

Also, make sure you use: Type->Show Hidden Characters

Susan,

Do you have placed artwork (.ai, .eps) that has those Pantone colors? That might explain why you can’t change them to CMYK in InDesign, you need to fix them in Illustrator. Also, if you don’t need spot colors, convert all of them to process in InDesign and Illustrator.