Common causes for random font swaps by InDesign?

Tech

Well-known member
I just noticed lately a couple of newly build layouts by designers using CS3 gets random font swap by Indy when opened in CS4 or CS5. When I ran PDF comparisons, some fonts are swap out without warnings and yet when I checked style sheets, those remains correct. I need to run some test but right now, I'm guessing it's either user error when building the style sheet or difference in OS causing Indy to behave differently or it has been a problem all this time and I didn't know about it???

Some of our designers also swears text re-flow when save-down from CS4 to interchange and reopen in CS3. I suspect it's doing the same time, swapping out fonts while style sheets remains unchanged. Has anyone else experience this?
 
We received our 1st CS5 customer file last week. (we are on PPCs and are about to get Intel Macs so we can upgrade...not that we want to). When we requested and got the IDML file, and re-output the job, there was a text reflow of the main body of text. We then had to request they send Press Qual PDFs. That was the only way of getting it out without a lot of time spent re-formatting/checking....
Operator who did job syas he loaded customers fonts, as supplied, when he processed the IDML/CS4 save-down file. I haven't got to backtrack it, and wonder whether it's really worth the time to do so; other fish to fry. We'll have upgraded in 2 weeks or so, whether we like it or not.
All's I know is I was mighty PO'd about it.
 
Interchange never worked!

Interchange never worked!

For a year or so, I was using interchange format to back-save CS4 docs through CS3 into CS2 in order to do data merges. After the merge, I always have to copy the data out of the CS2 file into the original formatting from the CS4 file... besides font issues, there are a variety of other problems with using interchange and I would never use it in a prepress context.

In my experience, it's like the ability to open Pagemaker docs in InDesign: useful to a designer to reduce the effort of re-constructing a document from scratch for a new platform, but really meant to be used in the first stage of document creation, NOT in prepress.
 
I'm talking about an interim measure while we upgrade hardware/software so we can actually run CS5. Most prepress people, I think, are caught between the instinct to delay while a bunch of other guinea pigs take the early-adopter pain from the inevitable bugs; vs. servicing their customers. Can't quite juxtapose multiple-level save-downs and PM files opened in Indy; up against one level save-downs. Naive as well as old, it seems.
Oh well, a couple of weeks or so, and we will be able to experience the joys of CS5. Can't wait.
 
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@Tech
random is the word i hang up on. There are or used to be some font equivalent tables, like regular and medium to solve the issue with Helvetica Regular and Helvetica Medium which was an old font flaw (or what else can i call it). The metadata in fonts was not always rigorously quality controlled, and as standards evolved you will find that compatibility was an issue. Should all fonts older than a certain date be banned? Should fonts with bad/missing/flawed metadata be banned? It won't happen.
Then there is the issue of different cutts of the same font: times, times new roman, helvetica, helvetica neue, frutiger, franklin gothic, gill sans, and clarendon are some of the fonts I have seen where the version number of the font can make a difference. As a prepress person this is a pain because some of these fonts you will have to manually remove from your system to load the "customer" version. I once even had it so bad that a book had been made by a client, different chapters in different regional offices all using Times New Roman, but varying versions… the book could not be made to a PDF all in one go but needed to have different versions of the font loaded for each chapter to avoid reflow. We finally managed to convince the customer to standardise on their font use to one version of TNR.

It is a problem, but due to the history it will be hard to change. I hope that tings will get better some day.
 
I just noticed lately a couple of newly build layouts by designers using CS3 gets random font swap by Indy when opened in CS4 or CS5...

...Some of our designers also swears text re-flow when save-down from CS4 to interchange and reopen in CS3. I suspect it's doing the same time, swapping out fonts while style sheets remains unchanged. Has anyone else experience this?


It's the software. Adobe has reworked the text engines in the newer versions of Indesign. If the file is made in CS3, open it in CS3. This is not a secret, it is a known fact since they came out with CS3 and people opening CS2 files had the same issue. The simple fact that CS5 only runs on an Intel Mac should be a clue to serious changes in the software.

Prepress still has the need to keep all versions of their software active in order to successfully process files. I have Quark 5, 6 7 & 8 running, and Indesign CS2, CS3, CS4, and CS5, just for that one reason. (I still have in a box, a copy of Indesign CS, and a copy of the original Indesign, pre CS, just in case.)
 

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