Montserrat Font Missing From Illustrator Linked Document in InDesign

Hi @brooke_1203:

OK, that's helpful. Unclear why your images didn't appear for me yesterday but I see both sets today.

Now, does your Illustrator file need to be an .SVG? This doesn't happen when I place a native .ai file, or an .ai file saved as Adobe PDF. If no, that's the answer and you can stop reading.

If yes, continue on. In the InDesign doc below, I typed the text in the first frame in InDesign, and placed an Illustrator to SVG file in the second frame.

The imported SVG adds two lines to Find Font: the missing Montserrat and Montserrat-Regular. (with a hyphen). The only content in the Illustrator file is the text Montserrat Regular and it is assigned Montserrat Regular, just like the InDesign file. I played with other fonts and am getting the same result. 

2026-01-21_10-17-00.png

I poked around a found a bug report on fonts in SVGs from my fellow Community Expert @UweLaubender that referenced this 2020 thread: https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/missing-font-error-not-going-away-after-installing-required-font/m-p/11664439#M407183.

So after reading about his experience, I tried packaging the same file I'm showing you above (File > Package) and

a.) The Package dialog box doesn't alert on the missing or duplicate fonts that are seen in the same file with Type > Find/Replace Fonts:

2026-01-21_10-30-58.png

and

b.) Packaging fixes it! Opening the packaged file shows that all is well.

2026-01-21_10-40-20.png

In conclusion, please understand that other people know a lot more about SVGs than I do and I'm just poking around trying to help you out, but my personal conclusion is that the SVG import is still buggy. Packaging seems to fix it if you need an SVG. Otherwise, just import a native AI or Adobe PDF—which is what I typically do and why I've never seen this before.

~Barb

That's progress! 🙂

Did you try deactivating/reactiving Monserrat on fonts.adobe.com?

And can you please share the Font Info as per my first screen shot?

~Barb

We are having issues with attachments at the moment, so I downloaded your image and added it to your question. Now that I can see it and mine, the font names are spelled differently than mine, which I just activated a few minutes ago.

I'll be curious to see what you post in response to my request but now I'm thinking you might want to go to fonts.adobe.com and deactivate Montserrat. Look for any lingering versions (there are lots of folders where fonts can be installed on our Macs, see list below), remove them and then reactivate the family.

InDesign Font Folder Locations on macOS

• User Fonts: ~/Library/Fonts/ (Type Cmd+Shift+G in Finder and paste ~/Library/Fonts/).
• System Fonts: /Library/Fonts/ (Accessible via Finder > Go > Go to Folder).
• Adobe Fonts (Application Specific): ~Library/Application Support/Adobe/Fonts.
• InDesign Application Folder: Applications/Adobe InDesign [Year]/Plug-ins/ (for font management plugins).
• Document Fonts Folder: A subfolder named Document Fonts inside your InDesign project folder, for fonts specific to that project. 

~Barb

Can you please share the same screen shot two more times, only this time click the font name and then click the More Info button? The easiest way to do this is to reply in your browser (not your email) and use the Insert Photos button (little mountain range icon) on the message toolbar.

~Barb

2026-01-20_11-17-24.png

And BTW, there is a similar dialog box in Illustrator (not as detailed). The same name should appear there.

2026-01-20_11-08-23.png

~Barb