Illustrator has a font cache?

[Joel Cherney]

I have a project where my client wants me to use Source Sans Pro. If I delete all of my Source Sans Pro fonts from my Win11 fonts folder and only use Adobe Fonts, then I get font warnings for Source Sans Pro Semibold, as well as a few others, and when I try to use Find Font, I see that my system seems to have five installs of Source Sans Pro Semibold, as well as four dropped font-warning entries. If I deactivate all Adobe fonts and install .ttf back into my Windows Fonts folder, then I get all twelve fonts I'd expect, as well as a second semibold face with an asterisk indicating that it is missing. 

It doesn't seem to matter if I am working in InDesign or Word or whatever, Source Sans Pro seems to work just fine, with no missing fonts or errors or doubled (or quadrupled?) fonts.

I have tried quite a few permutations of uninstalling fonts, deleting Windows font caches & stopping the font cache service, signing into and out of CC, activating and deactivating fonts on fonts.adobe.com, with no real change in behavior. 

So, each time I open a file (twelve languages, twenty files per language) I have to do a font-replacement rigamarole that has to be redone every time I save and reopen the file. Can any of you folks suggest some kind of troubleshooting or font-cache-clearing that I maybe haven't done yet? 

[Monika Gause]

Do you have any font manager installed? Illustrator might not like it.

[Joel Cherney]

Nope, I have rejected all font management apps since Suitcase once got in my way in Mac OS 7.5. Thanks for the idea, though. 

[Bobby Henderson · Accepted solution]

Are you using other non-Adobe graphics applications while Illustrator is running? I'm only mentioning this because if I have Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW running at the same time a decent number of type families will come up with one or more fonts missing in Illustrator's fonts menu. Certain existing AI documents will have missing fonts when opened. If I close both applications and then re-launch Illustrator all of my fonts return in the font menu.

[Joel Cherney]

It's not another graphics app, but it has to be something along those lines. I have "Auto-activate Adobe fonts" turned off in the Preferences, but if I shut down one of the utilities in my system tray with a problem PDF open in Illustrator, I'll get a dialog informing me that Source Sans was successfully activated. (The utility in question is PureText, which lets me turn any formatted text on the clipboard into raw text.) 

What I find most odd about this is that it's really just one PDF that causes the problem. It's the first numerically in the folder, and if I open it in Illustrator while PureText is running, it seems to "poison the well" for Source Sans for all other documents in Illustrator going forth, even after reboots. If I sign out of CC and clear font caches, and I shut off PureText after reboot, then I can open that document and work on it. 

[Bobby Henderson]

I really think Adobe needs to do some testing about this. The condition I describe about CorelDRAW causing a conflict with fonts available to Adobe Illustrator is something I have repeated on multiple computers. It's a real bug. In my own experience I've suspected Corel was more at fault because I have a number of type families that don't work 100% within that application but do work properly in Illustrator. Certain styles of a typeface "super family" aren't available in Corel's font menu. But when CorelDRAW and Illustrator are open at the same time the contagion seems to spread even worse to Illustrator. I use the Windows OS, so I even suspect Windows could be partially at fault. I've talked to a few different typeface designers that point to the OS as being a possible culprit because operating systems have a default mindset that any typeface has only 4 styles: regular, italic, bold and bold-italic. Modern typefaces can have upwards of 100 styles or even considerably more than that. Operating systems like Windows apparently really stink at understanding this situation. These problems of missing fonts or font conflicts could be sourced to that issue.

[Joel Cherney]

I really think Adobe needs to do some testing about this. 

[...]

I've talked to a few different typeface designers that point to the OS as being a possible culprit because operating systems have a default mindset that any typeface has only 4 styles: regular, italic, bold and bold-italic.

... oh, yeah.  Now I rememer filing bug reports about this issue, more than a decade ago. Drove me nuts, at the time. 

I just scanned the bug reports in the Illustrator UserVoice, and didn't find any mention of it.  Given the age and severity of the issue, I wonder why no one has tried. I do see plenty of low-vote, minimal-explanation, no-attachment bugs reporting missing fonts, though. I wonder how many of those "bugs" that lack troubleshooting information and attachments are actually identical to the issue we are discussing. 

UserVoice seems like a much better solution for bug reports than ye olde black hole bug submission form that we once had. Maybe I will post this one over there, after my client approves or rejects my plan to share their well-poisioning PDF file with Adobe. 

(As an aside, I wonder how much of this problem is related to my client's use of PDF as a file format instead of native .ai. Over in the InDesign forum, we frequently tell people "Illustrator is not a general purpose PDF editor!" This particular client does not seem to have received that particular memo. I cannot help but observe that the trigger to get this bug to appear is my attempt to edit a PDF that has Source Sans Pro Semibold embedded...)

[Bobby Henderson]

If the client created the PDF within Adobe Illustrator and saved it using the default settings, which turn on the "preserve Illustrator editing capability" option, there shouldn't be a problem. Many PDFs generated in other applications can be an absolute mess when placed in Illustrator. If I'm having to harvest some artwork elements out of a customer provided PDF not generated using Illustrator I'll often have to give the artwork one or more passes using Astute Graphics' Vector First Aid plugin. The plugin doesn't fix everything but it can automatically clean up a lot of junk that would be a big waste of time to fix otherwise.

I'm wondering if the client has some odd build/version of Source Sans Pro. A lot of typefaces will get revised and re-released. They might be named the same but the internal changes might be enough to throw off an application and make it want to go into font substitution mode. I have to periodically check my account at MyFonts for bug fixes and tweaks made to fonts I've previously purchased.

[Joel Cherney]

The people who actually put these documents together knew what they were doing; this is clear from their assets, and snippy commentary, to be found off on the pasteboard. I bet that if they were using PDF as a storage format, they would have used that "preserve Illustrator editing capability" settings. But the project managers who handed 'em off to other project managers who handed 'em off to me Did Something, and now they're no longer easily editable within Illustrator, and look like somebody printed to PDF with "High Quality Print" joboptions. 

I don't do enough Illustrator work to merit a subscription (I typically only mess with the artwork if I need to move something to fit e.g. an obscenely long Russian translation), but if I did actual artwork, I would subscribe to that plugin bundle without hesitation.  

[Bobby Henderson]

Yes, if other people in-between you and the original artwork creator are adding notes or any other details to a PDF it's very likely any such changes would strip the Illustrator-friendly nature out of that PDF. There is a lot of PDF generating software that only creates a big heaping mess. Regarding Source Sans Pro, the typeface is available from multiple sources (Google Fonts, Adobe Fonts, Font Squirrel, etc). I haven't tested this, but it's possible the file names or internal "guts" of the files themselves could be slightly different from one vendor to the next. And there's the issue of the font files being revised from time to time to add more glyphs, fix bugs, etc.