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Participant
September 23, 2021
Question

Character Styles missing after switching from Mac to PC.

  • September 23, 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 94 views

Hello,

For the last three years, I've been working on a Mac at my company. They just recently switched me to a PC to better connect with the company servers for remote work. We'd developed specific character style sheets for our product manuals that are not appearing in the Character Styles drop down now that I'm opening the document in InDesign on the PC (even if it is a packaged document). How do I get them back, or do I need to recreate all the styles? 

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1 reply

Randy Hagan
Community Expert
Community Expert
September 23, 2021

You'll probably have to redo the character styles to be compatible with your Windows fonts. Postscript Type 1 and TrueType fonts will be entirely different from the ones you used on the Mac platform. And sometimes, even OpenType font usage, where the same font files can be used on both platforms, will get scrambled in the transition if you're using different cuts of a font with the same name.

 

So you'll have to reconcile the discrepancies and tie all your paragraph/character styles to the fonts on your PC system. At least once. Create a new file, and set all your paragraph and character styles exactly as you want them to be used on your PC system. If you need to update a lot of files and/or use these styles in new documents on a regular basis, it might behoove you to name that file something like Copy Font Styles From Here.indd and put it somewhere it'll always be handy.

 

The good news is, after you do that, you can lather/rinse/repeat by then using the Load All Text Styles... command from flyaway menu in the Character Styles or Paragraph Styles panel. For each new/existing document, simply navigate yourself over to Copy Font Styles From Here.indd, hit the Open button, then, when the Load Styles dialog box opens click the Check All button and then the OK button, as shown below, to apply your updated paragraph and character styles to the target document.

 

 

Easy Peasy.

 

Hope this helps,

 

Randy