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Question

Microsoft fonts into InDesign or Illustrator?

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
March 30, 2022
4 replies
5291 views

How do I get Microsoft fonts (specifically Khmer UI, Khmer Sangam MN) to load and be useable in InDesign and Illustrator? I see and use them in Microsoft but they are not working well in InDesign. Some characters are missing. I am on a Mac not a PC, btw. Thank you!

R

Richard354586337jxg

Participant

One way I've done it for individual words is to write the word(s) in MS Word. Save the document as a PDF. Open the document in Acrobat Pro. Under Tools select Export a PDF then Other Format as an option. EPS is one of the options. Save the file as an EPS then place into Illustrator. Granted, this is only suitable for one or two words, but it works.

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

Wow, this one is a blast from the past! More than twenty years ago, I would sometimes turn my Khmer translator's PDFs into outlined EPS files using this workflow. It was essentially the only way to repurpose that text - as they would not deliver live text at all, fearing that I would damage it in the typesetting process. (It took some time to earn their trust. Also, InDesign didn't really have good complex script support, back in the CS2 era.)

However, I can't reccomend that anyone use this workflow at all in 2024, for any reason. Yes, it totally works for a few words, if you're trying to cram an unsupported script into InDesign. But if you can key Khmer text into Word, you can do it in InDesign as well; there's no need to saddle yourself with this 20th-century workflow. Very resourceful of you, though, to come up with it.

Willi Adelberger

Community Expert

Microsoft saves its fonts in their application.

On the Mac you do following, to get MS fonts:

Right Mouse click on the Application Icon (MS Word or PowerPoint)
Show Package Content
Go to Ressources
There you will find the DFonts directory.
Copy all fonts from there to the Font folder, where InDesign will find those fonts.

F

Fredrik25964904fp92

Participant

Brilliant, thank you!

Diane Burns

Inspiring

Just to add to Joel's comments, are the fonts showing up in InDesign's font menu? If so, it's likely the composer. Also, I recommend taking a look at Google's Noto fonts. They are free and have an enormous range of language/glyph coverage. We use them often. https://fonts.google.com/noto

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

Some characters are missing? I don't think that this sounds like a case where the font is not showing up in InDesign, right? I suspect that you're working in Cambodian and haven't turned on the World-Ready Composer. If the font shows up in the list, it's installed. If it's not rendering your Khmer text as you'd expect, it's probably because you're not using the correct Composer:

This can be set in a bunch of places (in Paragraph Styles, in Type -> Apply World-Ready Composer, the Justification dialog I've shown here, etc.). That's where I'd start. If this isn't the issue, can you please provide some more detail?

Also, please note that Khmer Sangam MN is not a Microsoft font, but part of OS X's infrastructure for displaying Khmer. I think it's an AAT font (Advanced Apple Typography) and I have no idea how well it works in InDesign, or if you'll be able to get it to work at all.

Willi Adelberger

Community Expert

Missing font has nothing to do with the composer.

Joel Cherney

Community Expert

While it's true that missing fonts have nothing to do with the composer being used, this question isn't about missing fonts, but missing characters. If you don't know how Khmer type is composed, it's really easy to see an uncomposed vowel sign with its little empty dotted-line circle and think that there is a missing character, when no character is missing:

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