Adobe InDesign CS/CS2 Breakthroughs [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Fonts

Find That Wascally Missing Font

InDesign says a font is missing, but I don't see any telltale pink highlighting in my document. Now what?

Go to the Type menu and choose Find Font, which opens a dialog box listing all the fonts used in the active document. Entries for missing fonts carry a yellow warning icon and appear at the top of the list. Select one of these MIAs and click the Find First button. InDesign jumps to the first character or character run using that font in the document and highlights them.

To replace missing fonts with ones you have, choose a font at the bottom of the dialog box. Don't forget to click the Change or Change All buttons; if you choose a replacement font and just click the Okay button to close the dialog box, InDesign doesn't change anything.

Sometimes, though, when you click the Find button, InDesign appears to do something in the layout, yet you can't see any highlighted text.

In this case, the bad boy is probably a difficult-to-spot space or non-printing special character (like a paragraph return), it's hiding in a frame's overset text, or it's the character "assigned" to an inline table or graphic. In all these cases, InDesign has difficulty showing you the location of the problem.

Our colleague Dave Saunders came up with a good tip for this: After you click the Find button, you can assume your text cursor is at the right place. Close the Find Font dialog box. Don't click anywhere immediately choose Edit > Edit in Story Editor, and the blinking cursor will be at the location of the missing font.

WARNING

A missing font could be in a style sheet. InDesign's internal font checking also counts fonts called for in Paragraph or Character Styles, even if they're not used in the document. If you suspect this is the case, try deleting all your unused style sheets (choose Select Unused from the Styles palettes menus and then delete the selection) and checking Find Font again. If the dialog box reports no missing fonts, that was your culprit.

If you think you might need to use one of those unused style sheets at some point, choose Edit > Undo to resurrect them. Unfortunately, replacing fonts via Find Font doesn't do diddlysquat to style sheet definitions, so you'll have to do check each style manually for the missing font and choose a replacement.

TIP

In Dante's Inferno, the fourth ring of Hell was full of designers double-clicking each InDesign style in a list of thousands, one by one, to open its Options dialog box to see if the styles' typeface was the one that Find Font said was missing.

Dante didn't know that a designer could apply each style to a short paragraph in a placeholder text frame, then choose File > Export and choose Tagged Text format. When this is opened in a word processor, all the style sheet definitions appear at the top of the document. The coding looks weird at first, but it's quite easy to suss out which style sheet calls for the font that InDesign said was missing.

Find the Font that Appears in Other Program's Font Menus

As far as I know, the font I want to use is loaded and active; and indeed I can choose it from other programs' font menus. But it doesn't appear in InDesign's font list.

InDesign's font menu doesn't simply list all fonts alphabetically; some are grouped separately toward the bottom of the list because they're a different class of fonts (foreign language fonts for example), and often the type foundry's name is ignored in the alpha sort (ITC Oficina is listed in the O's, not the I's). So if at first you don't see a font, keep looking.

If you still don't see it, then go looking on your hard drive. Some programs install their own private fonts folder and set of fonts when the program itself is installed. Microsoft does this, so do some individual Adobe applications. Check your program's documentation or search your hard drive to see where the font is located. Unless it's in a special "required" folder, you can usually move it to a common fonts folder that all programs can access without a problem.

Unbold Bold-Looking Type

I don't know what I did, but suddenly some of the text in the frame I was working in became very chunky, as though I had applied "Bold Ugly" style. According to the Typeface style field, though, it's a regular Book font.

You accidentally applied a stroke to the type. Select the characters and look at the Stroke icon at the bottom of the Tools palette, or the Stroke icon at the top of the Swatches palette. If the "T" there has an outline, there's your problem. Click the Stroke icon to bring it to the front if necessary, and click the [None] color to fix it (Figure 3-15, next page).

Smooth Font Display

Why does the type look jaggy in this particular document? All of it looks bad, regardless of the typeface. InDesign isn't reporting any missing fonts.