InDesign Font Replacing

[Craig B]

We have an issue where we have some people (not in our office) who creates or updates InDesign files. The issue is that person has truetype versions of our corporate fonts and we have postscript versions. When we open his documents it says we're missing the fonts (even thoguh we have them in postsrcipt).

Now, granted, every time this happens, we could manually "replace" the fonts with our postscript version and vice versa, but this seems to be hugely counter productive.

Does anyone know of any fix that wouldn't require those other individuals buying the licenses for all the various weights of our fonts in postscript.

I was hoping that you could somehow force InDesign to always substitute certain fonts with another. Or perhaps somehow "rename" the truetype fonts so that they coincide with the postscript eliminating the need to deal with the "missing fonts" dialog box.

Does nayoen have any ideas that might help? Thanks.

[Ned]

There is a way to do this if I remember, Craig. I remember off-hand the Quark way, but don't remember the Indy method right now... I'll scour my brain for you, but I don't have have access to Indy on this computer.

*EDIT: Go in the Type menu and choose Find Fonts to find your missing fonts first. You only need to change one character by using the Find First function to find and highlight the first character, then when you choose a replacement font use the Change All button to change all the instances in the document.

[emucru]

Just adding to Neds solution... ff you are using CS3, save the F/C so its faster to perform on all your docs. or open all docs and Search all documents instead of just the current one.

[Craig B]

Thanks guys. I know how to do that, but I'm looking for some way to permanently map the replacement font, so that any time it finds a "missing font" of say "comic sans" it always replaces it with "helvetica". Without prompting me ... does that make sense?

[Exodus]

I don't think there is a way to do that. If there is, I would like to know as well.

[Craig B]

InDesign obviously does it, which is why it says "will replace with the default" ... but I'd like to modify that.

But your right Ex, I don't think it does. I've scoured the webz and cannot find out how.

[garricks]

I'm fairly certain it could be scripted...maybe if you post over in the Adobe InDesign Scripting forum someone can help...my scripting skills are shite.

[Broacher]

PageMaker had this (and as far as I know, so does Corel, still)-- something called Panose font substitution-- on the fly substitution.

There's an InDesign plugin I've tried that comes with a certain font manager that kind of does this, only I found that to make it cover your whole font catalog (and why would you want anything less?) you have to create such a massive dbase file that it positively throttle or even stall the whole system when you use it.

I still don't see why today, after all the advances in font technology, we can't simply give ID system permission to lock up (and sub, if necessary) in our font dbase all the missing fonts, and activate them. What's the big deal there? Man, CorelDraw has been doing that for years and years. Is it really rocket surgery?

[graffiks]

Not sure if either my ideas would be easier, but my first thought would be to go under file/preflight. Then under "fonts", you can select the font you are trying to replace and click on "find font". This would take care of the whole document at once.

The other idea is if you were to create a style sheet, but that would leave you going to each paragraph or text box individually.

[Ned]

I see where you're getting at now Craig, and I don't think there is a way to do that.

When it replaces with the "default" font, I'm not sure if it uses your document's default, Indy's default (both set with the character palette), or the OS default.

Sorry I can't be of more help here...

[Craig B]

I agree Garricks, a script would be nice ... oh well. I'm not losing too much sleep over it. It's annoying and we may just license the proper version of the font, but if not, we'll make do.

[Pointyhat]

Craig, is there anything in your font management app that you could use?

[graffiks]

Another idea may be to have your clients change there text to outlines.
Also, how important is it to stay in Indesign - Could it be exported to PDF?

[urstwile]

Interestingly, Microsoft Word lets you set preferred font replacements. Which is no plug on my end for Word, but it's weird that InDesign won't.

[garricks]

Urstwile, IIRC PageMaker allowed preferred font replacement, too. :confused: