InDesign text changes font on export

[sschardan]

I am using FP 6.0 in Acrobat 9 with InDesign CS3 on a Mac running OS 10.4.11.

 

Despite our best efforts to educate our clients, they continue to design variable data jobs with extreme amounts of InDesign text formatting (kearning, tracking, leading, horizontal and vertical scale, small caps, superscript, subscript, justification, etc.) that does not carry through to FP very well, if at all. So, I have to do my best to try and recreate their formatting using FP. It is usually a compromise at best.

 

One thing that complicates these issues and completely drives me nuts, is that on occasion, the fonts will completely substitute to a different font when exported from InDesign. I completely understand the "use local fonts" and "load fonts" issues and am diligent in managing my fonts for FP. It is not a recognition issue, because once in FP, all the fonts are available. I just have to go in and change all the fonts from my default "Helvetica" to be what they're supposed to be "Myriad Pro Bold Condensed" or "Myriad Pro Condensed Italic", etc.

 

Any solutions?

[Dan Korn]

Are your customers sending you just the InDesign files, without the fonts? Perhaps the font they had on their machine when they created the InDesign document is not the same font you have on your machine.

[sschardan]

The customer is sending their fonts, and they are the fonts we are using. I have made certain that their fonts do not conflict with any built in system fonts.

[rpaterick]

I had to go back to InDesign, write down all the "fun" stuff the client wants done to font/text area for each text box and apply those settings in FP.

[guiprepress]

You can't do kerning in FP can you?

[Dan Korn]

You can't do kerning in FP can you?

Of course you can, but what exactly do you mean by "kerning?"

 

If you mean actual kerning, as in, whether to remove extra spaces between certain letter combinations in non-monospaced fonts, such as the space between the W and the A in the word "WAR"? If so, then you can control whether this kerning is performed or not in any given paragraph by checking the Kerning check box on the Paragraph Formatting dialog (which is invoked by clicking "Paragraph" on the Variable Text Editor), or by changing the "kerning" attribute of the <p> tag in tagged markup.

 

If you're talking about tracking, that is, squeezing all the letters in a word closer together, you can also control that with the Tracking box on the Paragraph Formatting dialog, or with the <tracking> tag in tagged markup (which you can apply to any given range of text, even a single word). You can also do copyfitting based on adjusting the tracking.

 

See the diagram here which explains the difference between kerning and tracking:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning

[marcusm]

Hi sschardan!

 

I had also big problems with the fonts getting wierd and the fonts were displaying wrong.

 

You have to check BEFORE you export your Indesign document that the frame that the text is in is 100%. Many designers tend to resize these and not the fonts. In the PDF later on Fusion Pro cant handle these resizes in %.

 

When you export frames with Fusion Pro Plugin the size of the textframe must be 100%.

 

The problem I see is that there are not enough options in the text editor when it comes to texthandling. It's hard to get an good copy of the original indesign file without complications.