Changing to a new font globally, keeping attributes (bold, ital) intact

[drewt15222641]

I've imported a long book manuscript into InDesign using the Place command. As expected, it's imported the text at the default text frame font (Times New Roman), including attributing the correct formatting (ie changing it from Times New Roman to Times New Roman Italic/Bold/etc) where applicable.

Now I want to try a few different fonts, but of course when I change the text across the whole document globally it loses the formatting.

Without having to go through 800 pages and manually reset every instance of bold and italic, Is there a method or plugin that automatically isolates every instance of italic, bold, etc and changes them to the correct italic, bold, etc version of the new font?

[Scott Falkner]

You could try Find Font.

[Barb Binder]

Hi Drew:

As per Scott, Type > Find Font allow you to locate and update all styles of a given typeface (and redefine styles at the same time), or if you design your documents using styles that are based on parent styles, you can redefine the parent styles and watch the updates cascade through the child styles.

~Barb

[Abambo]

I have very often documents with different languages. To facilitate changes, especially in character sets (Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, Latin), I use structured paragraph styles and character styles. That works quite good for giving the same look and feel for the document. But that is only true if you start your document in a structured way from the beginning.

For a completed document, Find Font is the best solution.

[TᴀW]

Why does it lose the formatting if you change the font?

If you select a lot of formatted text in InDesign, and, in the font menu, scroll down to a different font and choose it, it will apply that font to all the text, and text that was italic will stay italic, text that is bold, bold, and so on.

It all depends how you select the font from the font menu. Because if you select a specific member of a font family (say by typing the first few letters of the name), then that specific variety of the font is applied (e.g. Caslon Italic). But if you use the first method, i.e., scroll down the list to find your font, you are able to apply an entire font family, and formatting is preserved.

One caveat: If the old font has a different style name (e.g. the old one has "italics") and the new font uses a different name (e.g., "slanted") the formatting might not be retained.

Ariel

[sandray36856319]

I'm only able to see the fonts individually - so not able to assign one font family.

Urgh

[tzee70]

It was a big problem for me, too, but if you scroll in the panel and go to the font name, instead of typing the font name, you will see that it has a little arrow on the right and in that name alla the varieties are in a group, and if you will click there, by scrolling, you will be able to preserve the formatting (italics, bolds, and so on). Thanks Ariel.

[NightOwl-11]

None of the recommended workarounds in this thread work (anymore). The best solution I found was to bring all the type into my InDesign file already in the font I wanted it in, pasted it with formatting, and then applied all other changes: size, leading, indents, justification, etc., in InDesign. 

Infuriating (and stupid) program change to say the least. 😞 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

If the bold and italics were applied (in Word, I assume) using the inherent spot-formatting function, those overrides are in no special class from those authors use to change fonts, font size, color etc. by "grab and paint" methods.

The solution, which should be a standard preprocessing step for Word import, is to replace all spot formatting with named character styles — search for all instances of applied bold and replace it with a Bolded style, etc. Then you will retain complete, precise control after import into ID.

It is not InDesign's fault, or Adobe's fault, that most Word users have no idea what "styles" are for, and create "long book documents" that are spot formatting from beginning to end. The ID pro's job is to prepare that raw mush for proper import. Importing such goo and then expecting ID to manage it perfectly, or provide tools that will fix source faults, is not a reasonable approach.

Also, going back to the OP, Word import can be style-mapped to a very fine degree. Preparing a Word doc so that it properly uses styles, and can thus be imported and mapped in one step, is a highly recommended approach that avoids the "obviously converted everything to a base font" problem noted.

[NightOwl-11]

In fact, I DID that, and everything imported PERFECTLY. This issue has to do with changing the font AFTER you're in InDesign and losing all pre-named character styles, which SHOULDN'T happen. Try reading the whole thread before going off on a "man-splaining" tangent next time. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

The only way a font change would erase character formatting is if you used a flawed approach. Most flaws I can think of involve poorly applied spot formatting from the Word source, which most ID operations will ignore or clear.

But I won't waste your time by 'splaining further. Best of luck.

[NightOwl-11]

*eye roll* I've been working with InDesign for 19 years. I could write a novel on its flaws. Past and present. 

Buh bye.

[sbrummett]

I use stylesheets that are based on a "Normal" style. I can edit the normal style and change the font globally, as long as the styles are named the same. For example, "book" = "book" and "regular" = "regular". However, I encounter issues when the fonts are not named the same, such as "romani italic" = "regular italic." In these cases, I use the find and replace feature to change the outliers, and this seems to work well.