Missing Fonts

Report · Jun 15, 2007

There are fonts installed on my system, which are available in Word, CorelDraw, and other applications, but they do NOT show up, at all, in the fonts list of ANY CS2 application ... InDesign, Photoshop or Illustrator. This situation might be true of OTHER fonts, but the only ones I'm conscious of are the basic four variations of Arial Narrow, and Arial Black. (Arial Black Oblique is ALSO installed, and it IS available.)

These EXACT SAME fonts WERE available in Adobe applications, as long as I was using XP. Now that I've switched to Vista, they've ceased to function.

I've tried reinstalling these fonts and rebooting. What else can I do?

Thanks!

bilglas

Report · Jul 10, 2007

"It seems like when InDesign generates its font list and the Find Font dialogue box, it gets its information on what fonts are available from PostScript files, not necessarily the fonts themselves."

"...replace the old Arial PostScript files..."

"InDesign was a help in that it was the only program which displayed both the PostScript file info and the font file path (otherwise Id never have known Helvetic.ttf was generating the Arial PostScripts)...."

Just two clarifications: the writer is using "PostScript files" to mean "(PostScript) Type 1 font files," and these ARE actual fonts. However, they later refer to "Arial PostScripts" to mean fonts showing up in the menu regardless of what fonts are physically around. Very confusing.

Cheers,

T

Report · Jul 17, 2007

Has anybody found a solution for this? How about Adobe Support? I could not find anything on their knowledgebase.

Report · Jul 18, 2007

I am using Limon fonts, specifically S1 and R1. S1 appears just fine (not at the bottom of the list), but not R1. And they both appear correctly in Word.

Tina

Report · Jul 19, 2007

I found the culprit but not exactly the solution. The problem is NOT related to Vista. It also happens in machines with Windows XP. The issue is related with Office 2007. Adobe products do not recognize fonts installed by Office 2007.

I did several tests. I installed Vista on a desktop. Arial Narrow is not installed as system font. Then I installed CS2 and Arial Narrow (version 2.35). It worked perfectly. After that I installed Office 2007. The problem appeared again: Arial Narrow displays as a variant of Arial. And if you a have a document in Word using Calibri, Distiller does NOT output the PDF because it does not find the font.

Then I tried to remove Arial Narrow version 2.37 (installed by Office 2007) and installed Arial Narrow version 2.35. A weird thing happened: the font appears duplicated in the Windows font folder.

I did the same tests in a desktop with Windows XP. Adobe products work fine with Arial Narrow as long as Office 2007 is not installed. Once you install Office 2007 the problem appears.

I called Microsoft and they told me they cannot help me with this. Adobe is not helping.

What the hell are we supposed to do?

Report · Jul 19, 2007

I can confirm the behavior but I'm not quite sure it's a bad thing going
forward. I far prefer to see these font styles linked properly to their
families.

Whether this was intentional or not, I don't know.

You might want to take this over to the type forum where the real font
gurus hang out. There may be some insight into this over there.

Bob

Report · Dec 03, 2007

I can tell you what the problem is, and it lies in the font name that is embedded in the July 2006 versions of these files.

There are "advanced naming options" in which one can specify the Preferred Font Family and the Preferred Font SubFamily to be exposed by Windows. In the 1998 versions of these fonts, those fields are empty.

In the 2006 versions, the Family is simply "Arial" and the SubFamily is "Narrow".

I used a font editor and changed these fields to Family = Arial Narrow and SubFamily as appropriate, i.e. Regular, Bold, Italic, or Bold Italic, and saved the modified fonts under new names. These fonts now show up in InDesign as Arial Narrow, with the 4 subtypes. Arial Narrow is no longer a subtype of Arial.

Yes, I know that modifying the files isn't legal, but I did this for testing purposes only, to determine the source of the problem. If you want to stay "legal", just install the 1998 versions, as previously described.

Report · Jul 19, 2007

The problem is that I cannot apply the following styles:
Arial Narrow Bold
Arial Narrow Italic
Arial Narrow Bold Italic

The only thing that I can apply is Arial Narrow itself. I would not mind if all the arial narrow styles would appear under Arial. The problem is that I cannot use the 3 styles above.

Also, how do you explain that the new fonts installed by Office 2007 as Calibri are not recognized by Distiller?

Report · Jul 19, 2007

>I far prefer to see these font styles linked properly to their
families.

And I doubt that anyone would be complaining if ALL the narrow variants were showing up with the plain variants. It's the missing italic and bold variants that seems to have people (rightly) steamed.

Interesting that this is an Office 2007 issue. One more reason not to upgrade.

Peter

Report · Jul 19, 2007

Ah yes...I do see the problem now.

Interesting. I'm guessing there's some type of bug there, but I'm not
enough of an expert in font technology to to even guess who's fault this is.

Bob

Report · Jul 19, 2007

>I'm guessing there's some type of bug there, but I'm not enough of an expert in font technology to to even guess who's fault this is.

But we can take a stab at who is in a better position to ignore or break an existing standard. ;)

Report · Jul 19, 2007

I never should stepped into this thread. Ignore everything with the
exception of confirming the behavior. :(

Bob

Report · Jul 19, 2007

Could you post a link to putting the genie back into the bottle, please.

Report · Jul 19, 2007

I FOUND THE SOLUTION!

1) Log into any computer running Windows XP, locate and copy the 4 Arial Narrow files:
ARIALN.TTF - 132 KB
ARIALNB.TTF - 136 KB
ARIALNBI.TTF - 136 KB
ARIALNI.TTF - 139 KB
Please note that the extension is TTF, not OTF (installed with Office 2007) and the size is smaller (Arial Narrow OTF size is over 170KB)

2) Copy the files to the following folder: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts

3) Open any Adobe product (I have tested with Illustrator CS2, Indesign CS2 and Indesign CS3). You will now see both Arial and Arial Narrow listed. However, Arial Narrow (Regular) is listed under Arial.You will see:

ARIAL and the variants:
Narrow
Regular
Italic
Bold
Bold Italic
Black
ARIAL NARROW and the variants:
Italic
Bold
Bold Italic

Therefore if you wish to use Arial Narrow Regular you have to select Arial and the variant Narrow. For the the other Arial Narrow variants, select Arial Narrow and the variant you want to use.

Please let me know if this worked for you. Good luck!

Report · Jul 19, 2007

I'd like to add to my earlier post speculating about responsibility.

As I'm not a font expert, nor knowledgeable about how Adobe products get information about what fonts are loaded in the system, I suppose it is possible that this is similar to the problems people report about various Adobe apps "breaking" their PDF workflow.

In those cases it has been suggested that the problems are caused by third-party developers' failures to properly implement the postscript standard. In fairness, it is not impossible, however unlikely, that Adobe could also be guilty of such a lapse, and that the newer fonts are making use of code in a new, but compliant, way which was not anticipated.

Peter

Report · Jul 28, 2007

Thanks you Mauro. That did the trick.

Report · Jul 29, 2007

BRILLIANT! It now works perfectly!

Thanks!

Report · Aug 03, 2007

It works!! Thank you Mauro!

Report · Aug 14, 2007

Mauro....you are my favorite person of the day! Thanks a bunch!

Report · Aug 21, 2007

If you are using Office 2007 or Vista and receive "missing fonts" error for the Arial Narrow family, then please try these intructions.

Office 2007 and Vista change the old fonts dated 11/12/1998 to a newer version dated 7/14/2006. Apparently, InDesign does not like this newer version. If you have access to a computer with Office 2003 (or a machine that doesn't have Office 2007 or Vista installed), then go into the folder C:\Windows\Fonts and grab the old versions of:

ARIALN
ARIALNB
ARIALNBI
ARIALNI

Dated 11/12/1998 and save to a folder.

Then go into the folder:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Fonts

and delete the files:

ARIALN
ARIALNB
ARIALNBI
ARIALNI

dated 7/14/2006

and replace with the older version.

This should resolve the issue.

-Rob

Report · Oct 15, 2007

Wow. Thank you Mauro. After killing an entire day on this, that trick worked.

Report · Nov 30, 2007

Cheers for that.Nice and simple!!

Report · Dec 11, 2007

Thank you Mauro for your solution and Peter for directing me to this thread.
This looks like it will work (although not completely convenient).

However I hate to blow a hole in your theory but I experienced the Arial narrow problem after upgrading from CS2 to CS3. It was OK in CS2, AND I do not have Office 2007 installed. I have had the same Arial Narrow fonts for years and so cannot be attributed to new version font files. The problem must be connected to Adobe CS3.

I think it would be nice if Adobe would address this with patch or whatever especially since Arial narrow is so universally used as a convenient "tight space" font. I have not come across any other fonts yet which experience this problem, but then I just went to CS3 about 2 months ago. Is there anything I should watch for?

Report · Dec 21, 2007

Unfortunately, this is not something Adobe can patch.

Microsoft made a change in the newer versions of Arial Narrow, to fill in some additional "name" fields in the font. Unfortunately, they also inadvertently gave all four Arial Narrow fonts the same OpenType "style" name in the new versions of the font. That's just a bug and causes some of the problems described.

But even without that error, the new fonts might very well be showing up as having different names, for the simple reason that they do indeed have different names.

Once Microsoft updates the fonts to correct the bug, and everyone moves to the even newer fonts, the problems will go away. Until then, there's not a lot Adobe can do.

Regards,

T

Report · Dec 26, 2007

Thomas, thank you for your insight on the naming issue caused by Microsoft. The thing I do not understand, however, is why if the font works fine in InDesign CS2 and does not in InDesign CS3, how is this not an Adobe issue? Obviously there was a change made in the way InDesign recognizes font identities between CS2 and CS3. It would appear that Adobe could supply an adaptation to the program to enable users to have access to one of the most universally used fonts. This is causing such a problem for me to the extent that I cannot use CS3 for any previously designed project and I do not dare to delete CS2 and cannot imagine when I would feel safe doing so. Most designers have projects that they update from time to time and most use Arial Narrow to some degree.

Unfortunately the solution suggested by Mauro did not work for me. I feel it is Adobe's responsibility to its customers to either provide a patch for InDesign CS3 if possible or work with Microsoft to provide substitute font files for the Arial Narrow family with are compatible with the new InDesign.

Report · Jan 02, 2008

This article has been some interesting reading because I have on PC that is having the same problem with Helvetica. In CS3 the only Helvetica that shows up in the font list is Helv Narrow after I get the Missing Font message and go to look for the font in the font list. Helvetica is installed and activated and shows up in PM6, CS2, but not in ID CS3.
I have a Dell running WINXP SP2, I upgraded IDCS3 to 5.0.1 and tried removing the adobefnt*.lsts but Helvetica Bold will not show up.

Thanks
John