I'm beginning to dislike Adobe

I have a big project due tomorrow, and none of the Adobe fonts I used to build the 40-page booklet will activate. Their help forum is useless. None of their dozen or so half-baked guesses to fix these problems work. I’ve been trying to fix this issue for three hours now with no luck.

Their CC app says it’s loading fonts, but the loading icon just spins and spins and spins.

Yeah, I’m venting, but I’m getting closer by the day to ditching my CC account and switching full-time to Affinity.

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Oh no :frowning: I would be fuming too :frowning:

At the risk of asking the obvious, did you restart your computer?

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Yeah, but always good advice. :wink:

After trying everything I could think of for three hours, I finally got the fonts to show up. I cleared all the InDesign preferences, uninstalled InDesign, reinstalled it, and started a new document to see if the missing fonts would reappear. They were there.

As soon as I chose one of the fonts for the new document, all the missing Adobe fonts suddenly reappeared in the booklet I’ve been building. And magically, they all showed up in my other Adobe apps too.

For what it’s worth, this fix wasn’t listed among the many other remedies on the Adobe help forums. I’m half tempted to post my fix there too, but then again, I’d probably be posting yet another half-baked idea for people to try that likely wouldn’t work for them.

I’m really going to be hesitant about using Adobe’s cloud fonts from now on for critical work. If I can’t rely on them, they’re useless.

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Beginning to hate Adobe? Way ahead of you on that, LOL!
Glad you got it sorted.

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Usually when that happens you need to log out of the cc app and your adobe login on the internet.

And go to InDesign and the Help menu and select to log out.

Restart.

Open the cc app, login. Login online.
Open InDesign, go to Help and ensure you’re logged in.

I’ve seen others report it but it never happened to me.

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I don’t think people understand what the relationship is.
Activate the font through the app or online.
Say you activate it online through your Adobe App.
That is then filtered down to the CC App to make it available for the apps are installed.
Then the App, like InDesign needs to connect to CC App, which checks in with the Online service.

There’s a 3 way connect happening, and if one of those links are broken, whether it’s a cache, or someother other dinky thing, then the link is severed.

Relogging in works most of the time.


And for the record, reinstalling and installing again rarely fixes anything.
This is best


If anyone else is having these issues there a troubleshoot guide here
Troubleshoot font activation problems in Creative Cloud.

Yeah, I tried logging in and out of CC and the apps to no avail. I tried almost everything I could find on the Adobe help forums that had supposedly worked for other people. It wasn’t until I uninstalled InDesign and reinstalled it that the fonts appeared.

However, I didn’t try the Creative Clou Cleaner tool. I’ll need to bookmark that for next time. Thanks.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had problems with Adobe fonts. It’s the first time all of them disappeared, though. Usually, it’s a specific font in a type family. For example, Minion Regular Italic was hit and miss for me. Sometimes it was there. Other times, it wasn’t. I finally stopped using the Creative Cloud version and installed static file backup versions of the family from Adobe CS.

I rarely use Adobe fonts and have the cloud version of UTC - so I can login on any computer or anywhere and use fonts.

I’ve heard people having issues. And it could be anywhere from a system minor update, to a firewall, to antivirus, to minor corruption in the InDesign file itself, and probably a dozen other things.

I think even one time a user setup a new user on their computer and it worked perfectly, something in the OS user setup was blocking it.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong - and when it does go wrong tracking down the problem is usually painstaking.

Welcome to The Cloud.
We’re here to make your life simpler and more convenient.
:roll_eyes:

I still remember buying magazines that had a floppy disk of a game to demo. Then the next edition of the game would have a floppy disk with an update to the demo to fix some bugs.

Same with full fledged games, if there was a bug, you had to go and buy the update to fix the bug.

Nothing has changed really, except it’s delivered digitally and the money is taken automatically.

Just more to go wrong … how anyone would think this is better than having the fonts installed on your PC is beyond me.

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Well you can have them installed on your PC.
But they’re part of the package deal that comes with Adobe CC.

If you want them you can buy them independently from the foundries.

Nothing stopping you.

Except for this very real thing:

I love how they use the term ‘retired’ when they really mean ‘clawed back’, LOL

Yep. A PITA.

That’s why i rarely use Adobe Fonts and get directly from foundries and install the cloud version of UTC.

Keeps things very simple.

This has got to be better than leasing them through a 3rd party (Adobe) who can change the deal without prior notice.

I agree.

But it’s handy for people who share documents and they have access to the same fonts and the same font versions - so no unexpected changes.

Ok - if the fonts are removed from the system both parties need to purchase the font. But this is outlined in the EULA as far as I know.

But who reads that.

I’ve been on the Adobe Forums for about 20 years and I have never seen this come up as an issue. At least to my knowledge, but I obviously have don’t know every thread ever made.

There’s pros and cons to everything. If we both use a version of Helvetica and you have version 1.2 and I have version 2.12 - then there would be font clash between versions.

But with CC it doesn’t happen. As everyone has access to the same font.
Same if I sent the file to someone using Affinity, they wouldn’t necessarily have that font, so they have to buy it.

Most printers I work with prefer getting PDFs with embedded fonts instead of the original files. There’s an exception here and there, but in those instances, converting the type to outlines typically solves the problem. When that’s not an acceptable solution, most foundries allow their font files to be packaged and sent to printers along with all the other files associated with the job.

Yep. But there’s a collaboration of design files these days. Before it goes to the printer. Plus ability to work from home, office, or anywhere on a different computer without illegally installing multiple license seats.

Converting to outline is never really an option - especially from InDesign and it doesn’t convert, for example, underline to a stroke, it loses it.

Best to use preflight in acrobat to outline the font. Which does a much better job. But again, I never really go down that route unless it’s very specific reason why.

Sending files by PDF to the printer is the best option. Agreed.

But if you’re collaborating on design files with others. Having a common library shared through Adobe Fonts is not necessarily a bad thing.
And can save both parties money on buying their own license.

I thought I read somewhere that font foundries were clamping down on their rights and that packaging a job with the fonts in the folder to a printers was no longer really allowed.
That was the whole reason Adobe came up with the PDF embed font in the PDF.

Anyway - horses for courses. If you want to use it then use it. If you don’t then buy them separately.

We’re both pointing out that the nature of the work varies so much that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.

As for Adobe’s cloud fonts, I think I’ll continue to use them for display type purposes, where I need a one-off typeface and can immediately convert it to outlines. Having near-instant access to quality typefaces that I might never need again is great — especially considering the price of using the font is part of the monthly fee.

For anything more extensive than that, such as text or standardized typefaces in publications, I think I’ll stick to static fonts I own rather than being beholden to the vagaries, quirks, bugs, and the sometimes “retired” type families in their cloud fonts.