InDesign Find/Replace Font - Deleting text? (Am I going crazy?)

[Zebra Jamie]

I replace fonts ALLLLLL the time. Constantly. Every day. Occasionally, as I am running through the Find/Replace Font process, text will be deleted instead of changing fonts. I can exit the feature and undo (all) the font replacements, and the text comes back. Then I repeat the process and it works the second time. (I can't seem to trigger this on purpose.)

So I have two questions: Is anyone else experiencing this?

And is there possibly a keyboard shortcut that I'm accidentally mashing? (I mean, it could be handy to have a "delete all text that is in this font" feature.)

Before you ask, everything is up to date and with the exception of occasional crashes, which never coincide with these text glitches, it's all pretty stable.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

Just one idea: If you chnage a font to something that doesn't "fit" anymore, you might be experiencing overset text where there wasn't before, so some text might be being forced to another text box because of things like Keep options, etc.

[Zebra Jamie]

Ah, I thought of that, too! But in the most recent episode of this, it deleted all the "light" text but left the "bold" text. (I was swapping Lato for Proxima Nova.) So I know the text wasn't just overflowing into the void.

[Robert at ID-Tasker]

Can't you use Char / Para Styles and just redefine them? 

[Zebra Jamie]

I've never used ID-Tasker, but I generally avoid character/paragraph styles because they just don't work with my workflow. (I've tried, it's been an absolute mess!)

I work with over 60 brands a month, and from the limited exparimenting I've done, I'd need 15-20 styles for each brand. If I copy-pasted text boxes between documents (like I often do) all the styles end up getting mixed and muddled and I run into printing errors and styles fighting within a paragraph. I'm 100% sure that's user-error on my part, but I haven't found a way to make them work for me yet.

[Joel Cherney · Accepted solution]

So I have two questions: Is anyone else experiencing this?

I've seen it exactly twice, in the last year or so. The first time I thought I'd just made it up; like you I'd assumed that I'd done something to cause it myself.  I've not been able to reproduce it at all. The only commonality between the two events was that both files were very old. If click on Help  and then hold down the Control key when clicking on About InDesign... then you get a dialog that will tell you about all of the save history. So, both the docs where I experienced this were quite old, having been started back in the Creative Suite era. 

So I just wrote it down to glitchy old documents and forgot about it. Old InDesign docs (ones that have a long save history) can have a variety of unusal & undesirable behaviors. As a translation-tech wonk, I handle mostly other people's InDesign docs, so I see pretty much every kind of "problem file" that can exist. 

If these files are yours, know that reusing old files as templates can get you into this kind of trouble (and many other kinds as well). 

If these files aren't yours... well, know that your clients' workflows can create a lot of extra work for you. In many cases I export IDML and re-open and re-save as new before I even begin trying to analyze the file, much less work in it.