Thanks for the information. This is pretty much what I have discovered. I took the time to redo the project with the SVG font converted to a normal OT font and the color applied in InDesign via GREP styles. However, I think Adobe's documentation needs to be more informative about this shortcoming of SVG fonts. When I first started looking for info on this (when my proofs came back with the wrong color), I could find very little on the topic. I'm hoping this Forum discussion will help some future designer. 🙂  ... View more

The original post for this thread is my annual headache. The devotion titles change, but I do these same books every year with a new theme. Devotion 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 would be the first lines. They are in a single InCopy file shared across multiple books.  ... View more

Interesting work around. I still think this bug needs to be fixed, but changing that space to extra wide did get my headers and footers to look correct in both my full page and half page layouts. Because the story appears in multiple size columns via InCopy, I was having a hard time finding a solution that worked in all the books the story appeared in, but this workaround works universally. Would there be a way to GREP this in the paragraph style if there is a consistent word in the first line to search for?  ... View more

Unfortunately, that didn't work for me.  ... View more

I could be wrong, but I believe universal standards were created for a reason. I know I rely on them for sending one file to a variety of printers around the world without worrying that my it will be rejected over a RIP technicality. This is really the first time I've had any issues with color returning wrong on a proof, and I really do believe the font is at fault and not the standard, even though you can get it to process correctly without the standard. The standard makes sure that a PDF meets the universal requirements for prepress and sure saves a lot of time with back and forthing with a printer (especially when you lose a day both ways when dealing with printers on the other side of the world). I strike this up in the column of "live and learn." I will avoid SVG fonts for now, at least until the standards catch up and Adobe advertises full support for them. As Rob pointed out fairly early in this thread, for simple color on a font, it's just as easy to apply the color using styles in InDesign. Colored fonts are really an unnecessary shortcut at this point. Whether it's a bug or not that these fonts don't process consistently on press is moot. The issue is documentation. Designers who might resort to using them do need to know that there may be issues with certain PDFs processing correctly when color SVG fonts are used. My 2 cents. 😉  ... View more

Thanks for digging that up. I wasn't sure if it counted as an InDesign bug or not, so I hadn't gone that far. Obviously it is reproducible since several have reproduced it in this thread, but since color fonts are fairly new and, from what my research has shown, intended for digital use, I wasn't sure that lack of print support was actually a bug. I will go comment and vote on the linked report. 🙂  ... View more

Our US printers were the ones that required the X standards for their online RIP apps. We just followed their guidelines and used them for everything. When we started printing in China, we added color conversion to US Web Coated SWOP V2 to the preset to prevent color variations we were experiencing on some of our products. It's interesting that you have discovered that the standard was causing the issue. After my 4 or 5 different attempts to fix the color issue, the only thing that actually worked was removing the font from the process (either by converting it to outlines in InDesign or by replacing the font with a standard black OTF). It's too late for me to try another standard for the output since I spent the necessary time to redo the files without the font and have already gotten my books into production. If you were able to get your workflow to work using other color fonts, I would assume it would have worked for my font as well, but with the language barrier dealing with China, I'm content to let this rest. I will flag your follow up experiements as correct answers for anyone else who runs into this issue. Thanks for your thorough work on this matter. Perhaps Adobe should add this to their documentation on support of SVG fonts.  ... View more

As to why we use the PDF/X4 standard . . . most of our printers have required it, so we created all our print presents based on it.  ... View more

Hey, all. I appreciate all the work you have done on this, but I will add that I always PDF/X4 standard on all my print PDFs. I was able to use one of Rob's fixes from the first night of my post to get a file that exported pretty darn close to the colors I wanted (and that I could pull into Photoshop with no deviation), but when I sent that file to the printer, thinking my problem was fixed, their RIP saw the whole file as RGB and screwed up the colors again. I was at the limit of what I could test in house without having access to the actual prepress software the printer was using. I gave up and redid the files excluding the SVG color OTF.  My caution to both of you is to not think you've solved the problem just by juggling the color conversions between ID, Acrobat, and Photoshop when you don't actually have access to the prepress RIP that will be used to process the file. Everything I tried that seemed to work on my end was rejected by the printer. My new files minus the troublesome font passed the prepress with flying colors (pun intended) and are now in production.  ... View more

Thanks for trying to script it for me. I wasn't actually using bullets/numbers as there were 6 different glyphs that were specifically assigned to specific content. I ended up revising the font and using GREP to assign the colors to the paragraph style based on the glyphs. It took me all day, but all six books are back to the printer and should process correctly.  Thanks for your help. Hopefully this post will serve as a warning to the anyone tempted to use color fonts for print production.  ... View more

This is what I actually ended up doing. Converting to outlines created flow issues, so I redid my font as a regular black OTF and then used GREP to assign the different colors based on the character used. This worked out much better than I'd dreamed as I typically forget to use GREP styles. It took me most of the day, but all 6 books are back at the printer and should process correctly now.  ... View more

Thanks. I'm not any good at scripting, and I need it done now. I'm going to use an intern in our office to do the grunt work unless someone can make me a script ASAP. I just pass on the warning to everyone that you can't use color fonts for print production. Lesson learned.  ... View more

If it helps anyway, the printer is using Prinergy for color conversion.  ... View more

So, I sent several files to the printer that we hoped fixed the problem, and the only one that preserved the color in prepress was the one where I had converted the icons to outlines in InDesign. Anyone have any idea how that can be quickly done? This represents a ton of manual labor to get these files printed properly.  ... View more

Thanks for all your work on this. Do you believe this counts as a bug that should be reported to Adobe since you were able to recreate the issue with a different font?   I will try sending the files without conversion. We had started doing the conversion on our files for this particular printer because the color coming off our materials were inconsistent if we didn't. We had a series of books with covers that had the same color and different printings of the same covers were coming off the presses with different variations of the color, and sending them forced CMYK files seemed to fix that, but that may be less of an issue with these interiors if the icons will print the correct color. I will quickly redo the print pdfs and get them off to our printer to see if your solution works. Thanks ever so much!!!! ... View more

Also, the printer's proof is not a press-ready document. They send us small digital proofs to show what they will be printing, not print-ready files. There is also a bit of a language barrier in troubleshooting the file since the printer is in China and only the sales person we deal with speaks any English.  ... View more

Thanks for the analysis!   Can you see if this page will run through your fixes without changing colors? This would be a work-around for me, but slightly less time-consuming. I applied the appropriate colors to the glyphs in InDesign. I can do the rest with six find/changes with the six books all open if this fixes the prepress issue.  ... View more

Thanks for all the replies. I want to reiterate that while I am interested in understanding why the colors are coming back wrong in the proof, I'm more interested in finding out a quick way to repair my print files so that they output correctly. These books are overdue by more than a month, and I really need to get them printed. This color issue is a massive headache that I need to fix ASAP! Believe me, if using a color SVG OTF is the problem, I will never do it again, but I need to find a way to fix six books as quickly as possible. Manually changing every single one of the icons into a graphic with an assign CMYK value in InDesign is going to be a very costly repair in time that I don't currently have at my disposal. I'm hoping someone knows a way I can fix the color values in the PDFs (possibly in Acrobat) to save me that time. Thanks again! ... View more

Oddly enough, they look the same in the forum preview. I believe you will need to download them to see the difference.  ... View more

Sample pages attached as requested. The drabber one is the proof. The icons are an SVG Open Type font.  ... View more

Yes, but the CMYK is correct in MY exported print-ready PDF. But then the proof coming back from the printer has the colors wrong, so that's why I'm confused. How can it be right in every way I can test it on my files, but the printer is somehow processing the file and coming up with the wrong colors.  ... View more

Here is the requested updated image with the swatches from ID. These colors were the colors used to create the font, but the font characters actually have black applied to them in ID since the colors are embedded in the font.  ... View more

The color swatches in ID will not help as the fonts are color fonts (fonts made with color) rather than having color applied to them in ID. I have checked the color separation in Acrobat, and on my PDF files the color values are correct, but in the proof PDFs they are completely different (per the screen shot I provided). That's why I'm so puzzled. It looks absolutely correct on everything on my end, but the printer says they aren't processing as the color I'm sending them. The only thing I can think of is that their prepress doesn't support colored fonts and maybe the SVG info on the font glyphs is being converted to RGB and back to CMYK as a different value. I need to find a way to prevent that from being an issue so the output on their end is the correct CMYK.  ... View more

 So, just an FYI to an old post. I've now had this happen to me four times. InDesign crashes, and when I reopen it, my customized workspace is reset to no panels open at all. I open my panels and try to recreate the workspace and nothing will dock on the right side of the application frame. I have now had to uninstall and clean 2021 completely off my computer and reinstall it, pulling preferences from the older version of ID that I've kept on my computer just so I will have my workspaces to recover when I install 2021 again. This is getting really old.  ... View more

Hey, thanks for the suggestion. If you look in my original post, I did say that I had reset preferences. It was the second thing I tried. The application simply would not let me dock any of the panels into the application window. It was the oddest behavior, and I don't think it was a preferences issue. When I reset the preferences, none of the default workspaces were working either. Removing the application completely seemed to be the only fix, which I see was one of the troubleshooting suggestions in the article you linked to. Thankfully, I'm not a newbie to InDesign (been using it since version 1) and was working through the usual troubleshooting steps before/after I asked for input. I was posting here more or less wondering if anyone else had ever seen the behavior before and to document my fix in case anyone else had the problem and searched the forum for help. Thanks again! ... View more

Hey, thanks for the suggestion, but if you look in my original post, I did say that I had reset preferences. It was the second thing I tried. The application simply would not let me dock any of the panels into the application window. It was the oddest behavior. I don't think it was a preferences issue. When I reset the preferences, none of the default workspaces were working either. Removing the application completely seemed to be the only fix. Something really got messed up.  ... View more

So I managed to fix it by uninstalling Indesign 2021 completely. Purging it off my computer from every app data folder, etc., and reinstalling the previous version for which I still had all my preferences. I then opened InDesign 2020 and made sure it had all my workspaces and preferences, closed it and reinstalled 2021 with the option checked to pull preferences from the previous version. I'm back up and running with a proper installation. Would still love to know what messed up 2021 so badly. A couple of app crashes shouldn't so thoroughly trash an application. ... View more

  Thank you! That was it. I never thought that there might actual be frame fitting option that needed clearing. I inhereted this file from another designer and hadn't really noticed that the behavior was only in that file. I selected "Clear Frame Fitting Options" and that fixed it. Bless you for unraveling what my problem was from my badly worded complaint! ... View more