InDesign - Hidden Characters Corrupting Documents

I post this message in the spirit of sharing information, hopefully to be of help others.
I recently encountered a problem after distilling a document from InDesign which, as an Acrobat PDF, would not print - giving three successive error messages:
1. The Document could not be printed.
2. There were no pages selected to print.
3. A drawing error occurred.
Well, that covers about everything !
After about an hour of patient diagnosis I discovered some erroneous characters had appeared in some bullet points and removal of these cured the problem.
I found them only after copying and pasting the text into Word (using the paste as "text only" option) and copying and pasting it back into InDesign. The spurious characters then appeared as a red-highlighted squares and could be easily deleted.
(Note: I had previously used the 'Show hidden characters' option in InDesign which did not reveal these little devils, neither did they 'appear' in the Word document)
I believe the erroneous character is probably a result of formatting which was in the original Word document imported into InDesign and which could be a 'flag' for bullet formatting (in Word).
The lessons I learned from this are:
patiently isolating the section of the document led to the discovery of the problem
be aware, in the future, of possible odd characters appearing (invisibly) from Word and corrupting InDesign documents.
Hope this may be of assistance.
I haven't given version numbers of my software since this is almost certainly not relevant - but the general principle is.
I hope this may be of assistance.

Thankyou for putting that on the record...

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