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...After our graphicss team worked on the document on a mac I went to open it only to have all the raleway fonts appear as 'missing' and listed as 'raleway otf' instead of regular raleway, despite having it on my installed on my machine and installed on theirs.
I both installed directly from the font file and activated on adobe fonts.
By @Elizabeth227373301qbk
This happens when different versions of a font are installed on the same machine or across several workstations. "Raleway" might not be the same as "Raleway," even though the font name looks the same to us users.
It's especially prevalent when cloud fonts are used along with traditionally installed fonts.
Adobe's fonts are cloud fonts (and also those from Linotype/Monotype and other font foundries, and even Microsoft is beginning to "regulate" fonts with its own cloud fonts). Cloud fonts are often turned on/off by either settings in software on your computer, or by font manufacturer...not by us. So when we check the option to use Adobe's fonts in InDesign and Creative Cloud programs, we are letting Adobe install/uninstall and activate fonts as it sees fit.
For some, that's a great feature, but we're seeing this problem when a combination of both cloud and traditionally-installed fonts are on the same computer: the cloud version of Raleway might be slightly different from the installed version, either with a different computer name (which we generally can't see) or copyright date or version or whatever. But something is different and the missing fonts warning shows up in InDesign.
Our shop has many workstations, Macs and Windows, as well as outside contractors so this is not uncommon for us. We have pretty much solved it by choosing one type of font and sticking with it: choose either Adobe cloud fonts or manually-installed fonts, but not a mix...and definitely not a mix within the same font family.
We chose to stop using cloud fonts from any manufacturer with very few exceptions. Instead we download and install hard copies of the font files. We also turn off InDesign's auto-font settings in the Creative Cloud manager app. It's now exceptionally rare that we get that royal PITA missing font warning anymore. And our systems are not so sluggish anymore because cloud fonts are continually monitored in the background by their manufacturer. Bleah! And many people don't know this, but the manufacturer can prevent their cloud fonts from being used in other programs.
How we did it:
- First, remove all Adobe cloud fonts from all systems.
- Turn off/uninstall the Adobe fonts in the Creative Cloud manager app.
- Uninstall the versions that were traditionally installed, too. You can do this with a 3rd party font manager or directly by the operating system's tools, like C:/Windows/Fonts folder or Font Book on the Mac.
- Reboot the computers to flush out any residual memory of the fonts.
- Install hard copies of the fonts. Many of Adobe's fonts like Raleway are available for free from Google Fonts at https://fonts.google.com/ and GitHub https://github.com/showcases/fonts. These fonts are part of an industry-wide project to create open-source (and open-licenseed) fonts for the computer industry. Unlike Linotype/Monotoype, FontHaus and other foundries, there's no extra fee/license to embed fonts into our files like PDFs.
- Ignore any future font warnings that say, "Gee, there's a missing font. Do you want to automatically install/activiate by ABC company?" Just say NO and go find a non-cloud version yourself.
- Return to work without problems!
For a short period of time, you might still get the missing font error because the file is looking for a cloud version. Just use Find Font and swap it for your traditionally-installed version and you'll be done with the problem.
Hope this helps.
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