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hannahjuliet
hannahjuliet
Participant
July 25, 2024
Question

Font looking different across two supposedly identical documents

  • July 25, 2024
  • 2 replies
  • 560 views

Hi all, I'm not a super frequent ID user--I designed an indie book several years ago, and learned just enough to be dangerous, but my author is asking for a paperback version, and trying to tweak the files is giving me an enormous headache. 

Original document: created summer 2021, Lucida Bright font. 

Now the weird part. I shift+selected both text boxes and the author photo, and I've set the clipboard handling to paste all formatting, etc, but it's coming out like this: 

As you can see, the text looks.... beefier, and the sculpting around the capital R is totally gone. The hanging indent around Mary's picture remains. When I try to type in either of these boxes, the text momentarily goes back to its more delicate appearance, but reverts quickly to this pixely, semibold mess. It also seems to be a different size, even though both documents say the font is the same size, and any alterations to the font create absolute formatting hell (below, going from 16 to 17pt).

I am hoping desperately that this is just my lack of experience, I've found a few topics that seem tangentially related, but involved digging into the actual code, which is completely beyond me. Did Lucida Bright get an update in the last few years? Does this have to do with the differences in default paragraph styles between the 2021 and current versions? What is the simplest way to make this look less rancid?

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2 replies

Scott Falkner
Community Expert
Scott FalknerCommunity Expert
Community Expert
July 26, 2024

The appearance of the text is probably just a result of different rendering. What is the source of the first image?

 

As for getting the text to wrap around the letters, it looks like this was done by manually inserting spaes. THis is a bad idea. I would use the pen tool to draw polygons over the letters (which appear to be part of the image) and apply text wrap to them. Add a stroke to make them visible to the user but make them non-printing, either through the Attributes panel or by isolating them to a non-printing layer.

James Gifford—NitroPress
James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
July 26, 2024

Good eye. You could also edit the text envelope, something I'd normally avoid but for fussy, picture-based work like this it might be simpler.

James Gifford—NitroPress
James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
July 25, 2024

This looks like the paragraph styles need to be updated and adjusted. There are many small reasons layout (especially small, tight layout like this) might not be identical across InDesign versions, and you don't say if this is the same system with the same font files, which can also change things.

 

I'd just go through and touch up the styles to get a close if not exact match to your original layout; there's probably no magic fix that would simply restore these fine details and thus avoid that step anyway.

 

I'm also not clear wny you're cutting and pasting the content into a new document, if that's what you're doing. Simply create a duplicate of your original file and adjust whatever's needed  — anything other than page size, if that? An interior layout should be the same for both a hardcover and paperback of the same trim size. Don't make the job harder than it has to be by trying to rebuild the book from scratch.

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