Participant

Question

How to un-do outlines fonts?

Forum|Forum|15 years ago
July 22, 2010
4 replies
83700 views

Help! I'm under deadline to update my wine labels and my designer from last year "created outlines"

so now all of my fonts are un-editable. They just appear as thousands of blue dots when selected.

Is there a way to change them back to regular text?

How to

D

darwin28204320mvgr

Participant

Always save 2 files, the original file in the text file and the copy file with the created outlined text, The printer normally asks for the outlined text file so it will not ask for the fonts,

cameronprudames

Participant

What I ldo .. before I outline the text I will copy all of the text into a new layer (does not need to have an artboard) make that layers visibility hidden. That way you only have to have one document which has the outline text and also editable text

Michael Riordan

Inspiring

Outlining fonts is a sometimes necessary evil. What I've learned to do is duplicate the type BEFORE i outline it and move that duplicate text to its own layer. When I turn of the layer, Illustrator does not trouble with it, does not say I'm missing fonts, ignores it basically. Then I go ahead and outline the original type that's on the original layer. If anyone comes along and asks for a change, I can switch my hidden type layer back on and work with text. If it gets shipped anywhere else and they don't have the font, the can at least turn on the layer and check the type specs and the name of the missing font.

Just a good working practice.

S

shunithD

Inspiring

Michael Riordan wrote:
Outlining fonts is a sometimes necessary evil. What I've learned to do is duplicate the type BEFORE i outline it and move that duplicate text to its own layer. <snipped>

That's an interesting way to go Michael...

I tend to use the other option of two files... must try this and see if it fits my ways...

Scott Falkner

Community Expert

No. You will need to retype the text and reformat. Now you know not to do that in the future and to tell all your designers not to.

S

skysaddle12Author

Participant

Thanks Scott....that's what I was afraid of, and what my

Illustrator teacher also told us never to do. I wonder why printers

want the fonts outlined...because they might not own the font?

It seems like Illustraor should have an "undo create outline" feature!

JETalmage

Inspiring

It seems like Illustraor should have an "undo create outline" feature!

I see that comment posted here every once in a while. It doesn't make sense.

When you "convert" live text to paths, you are instructing Illustrator to "act like a PostScript printer" and fetch the actual Bezier paths that are contained in the font file, and put copies of those paths on the page. Once you have done that, the resulting paths are just ordinary paths. They can be manipulated as ordinary paths (which is the real intent of the feature to begin with). They are not any kind of special object that maintains some kind of connection to the font from which they are extracted. There's nothing stored in the file that says "This path was originally obtained from a glyph slot in font XYZ." That wouldn't make sense, because the path could have been cut or otherwise manipulated long since it was obtained. (Again, that's the whole idea. The feature's purpose is not to exempt printing firms from having to obtain fonts.) The path is just as if you had drawn it from scratch with the Pen tool.

So now imaging you just draw a path with the Pen tool. Would it make sense to tell Illustrator to "convert" that path to a live text object of a particular font? Of course not. There is no data correlation between a path and a font.

JET

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded