Thanks for the heads up, Thomas. I hadn’t had any news on this so far :(

I have gotten the tip from Adobe to allow full disk access to illustrator, so that the problem would then be solved. Although that did not seem to be connected at all I tried. Today I can say: It still does not solve this problem, I have this problem still. please investigate further!

Thomas, I am told the team is investigating this.
The main guess is that Ai subsets a wrong character when writing a PDF copy of the file. Perhaps of some inner conflict the auto-generated hyphens Ai displays dynamically get converted into the the ones next to the hyphen in the symbols table — plus signs...
So the investigation is going. Thanks for the persistence!

The problem still persists and we would like to hear back from you. any news?

This problem still exists end persists. Any news on if and how and when it can be fixed?

Any news on this?
I sent the requested files.

I have just sent you the files via email. Please contact me at any point if you need further information etc. I am very hoping to resolving this somehow.

Thomas, please send it then to sharewithai@adobe.com, along with the full set of files from this report. Please also put the link to this report so the team can track it (http://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/601447/suggestions/46705147)

If you have a way of being able to send the font just to you, I'd do that.

Very peculiar.
I searched the web for the font and the first link I’ve been given is http://fonts3.com/fonts/i/ITCAvantGardeStd-BkCn.html
The site claims licenses are OK, so I gave it a go (can you compare it with the one you have on your machine? font files differ, even when names match)
Alas, when I opened the .ai file — no plus signs were shown to me. The font got recognized, but proper hyphens got displayed. PDF really shows pluses.
This is all pretty strange. My guess is that some shifting occurs in the code table. Hyphen an plus are neighbors usually... Shared the link with the font team.

I have found a file. I cleaned it so that it cannot be traced to a customer.
I upload it without the fonts. The font used here is ITCAvantGardeStd-BkCn.otf, I have seen the similar thin with other fonts as Clan e.g. I Put a PDF in there as well so that you can see how it looked here, in case it is correct on your end.

this happens on many computers in our company, I'd say, from what I have seen here, that it is not dependent on the computer, rather on something else, which I cannot point my finger to.

If you need anything else, contact me. I'd be happy to help fix this problem at the soonest.

P.S.: As I was checking the files and wanted to writhe the PDF smaller, the newly opened AI did have its normal "-", so I could not recreate the problem so far. Lucky I wrote the PDF in the first place.

I hope you find something.

Hi Egor, thanks for the quick response. I will. But I'd be uncomfortable in sharing it here openly. I am confident that you will be using the font only for the purposes of finding a bug, but I am certainly not allowed to have it here for everyone, same with my file, that my customer might not want to see publicly, even stripped to this problem.
Is there another way of providing the files, when I get this problem again?

Wow! Never saw anything like this.
Thomas, do you have at least a screenshot of this? or better the document you can share? If you ever get it again, please make a copy of the document, remove everything but this text and share here, along with the font you are using (if you are allowed to). The team will investigate this.