Since no one else has answered, I’ll wonder aloud: this isn’t by any chance one of those cases where the language attribute assigned to the text differs from the default dictionary, perhaps thanks to a character or paragraph style?

David

PDF began as a proprietary standard, but in 2008 it became an ISO standard. According to Wikipedia, at that time “Adobe published a Public Patent License to ISO 32000-1 granting royalty-free rights for all patents owned by Adobe that are necessary to make, use, sell and distribute PDF compliant implementations.” Every day I see PDFs whose Document Properties show they were produced by all kinds of software, not just Adobe's — utility bills, journal articles, you name it. Meanwhile, major e-book readers such as Kindle, Nook, and iPad are not exactly open systems.

As for “better,” that's still in the eye of the beholder, even for novels. I use an e-book reader every day, but when I want to curl up with a good book I usually go for paper — though occasionally I'll use an electronic version for searching. And chances are any book printed this century passed through PDF.

David

You can trick InDesign into putting 2 or 3 short footnotes on the same line by defining variants of the your main footnote paragraph style to indent to the appropriate point and then setting the leading to zero, which causes the 2nd and 3rd notes to overlap the line for the preceding note.

Naturally, such trickery has drawbacks. First, it isn't automatic; however, Peter Kahrel offers a script that can help (along with a fuller description of the trick). Also, selecting an overlapped note for later re-editing is not simple — use the story editor. And obviously adding additional notes may require re-adjusting which special style is applied where.

David

I switched from PageMaker to InDesign with ID2, and in InDesign's lengthy development since then its reliability in importing Word documents seems to have gone from reasonable to voodoo. When I see text misplaced, my first thought is someone forgot to accept all the tracked changes: before importing any Word file into InDesign, I generate a PDF, which makes tracked changes obvious, and resolve them before trying to bring the file into ID.

Another major casualty of the voodoo is footnotes, some of which disappear in ways that defy understanding. I used to think the losses related to the fact that most of my (admittedly specialized) work includes East Asian characters, and I supposed the multi-byte encoding threw off ID's import routines. However, others have reported the same problems with simpler text. My specialization in scholarly work also means some of the manuscripts I receive were prepared using Endnote to handle citations, relevant here because Endnote adds data to Word files invisible to ordinary human readers and quite possibly falling into Jongware's category of “invisible code inside Word that InDesign refuses to 'count'” (see InDesign CS5: Workaround for missing footnotes bug).

Sad to say, it is all to easy to think the InDesign programmers simply haven't kept up with features added to Word files.

David

As for styles, you can define a character style for your Russian words, which would simplify manipulating the Cyrillic font. Applying it to every instance might not be trivial unless the manuscript came with the Russian language attribute already applied to those terms: ID can search for individual language attributes, but unfortunately they frequently are not applied properly in the first place, or get “moved” during import into ID; they may need fixing as they can interfere with hyphenation. I find a character style that includes language in the definition very handy for this. (I first studied Russian with a gentleman who also taught soldiers at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, including an advanced course on swearing; Russian slang has never been easy to pick up, so ID's hyphenation might not be very useful.)

David

Young grasshopper, the master has spoken true words: you must follow his clues and understand GREP's essence (hint: Regular Expressions are text, not attributes).

As it is written, InDesign styles cannot add text, not even GREP styles; however, find/change, including its GREP incarnation, can perform this feat; find/change searches can also be saved for re-use, and you can even add text from the clipboard, preserving formatting or not as you choose.

The “one-click” way to style copy is to put the cursor in a paragraph (or select all) and then Alt-Click on the desired Paragraph style's name. However, this forceful method may produce unintended consequences. Often it is better to fix copy that is supplied incorrectly. Here, too, the master has spoken.

There's also Skilldrick's id_barcode, though I haven't tried it.

David

There is no substitute for knowing the hyphenation rules for a given language. In the case of English, it helps to know that rules differ between British English and US English.

David