Need to Replace Pink Boxes in Text!

[snippy-snappy-chappy]

This is driving me mad, I have a font that goes A-Z 0-9 and that's it so any characters I put in like ! or ? become pink boxes.

In Illustrator it automatically replaces these with another font which is great.

What I need to know is how to replace these boxes specifically with another font. PLEASE HELP.

Tom

[winterm]

Use this simple regex:

\W

in Find/Change dialog (GREP tab), or as a GREP style option of your Paragraph style, and apply to it a Character style, which defines a different 'replacement' font.

Edit:

And please notice the upper case of W. It's important and doesn't mean 'shouting' here, as it means when you write a query title all in caps...

[snippy-snappy-chappy]

Ok hang on so I would go to grep and put find \W but what would I put change to? how to I apply a replacement font?

So is \W the symbol for the pink box I take it?

Tom

[winterm]

\W stands for any not-a-word-character. That said, characters, other than A-Z 0-9. Those lacking in your 'main' font, right?

Just make a Character style with your replacement font defined:

Then add GREP style to your Paragraph style:

… and you should be good to go.

[winterm]

Alternatively, you could use Find/Change, but GREP style is preferable here, imho.

[Geоrge]

>> but GREP style is preferable here, imho.

Many works for GREP-style, — slowly working InDesign.

@snippy-snappy-chappy

You're need to edit your font and add additonal symbols into it.

[winterm]

George_Salnik  wrote

Many works for GREP-style, — slowly working InDesign.

Not a big deal if machine is fast enough.

Again, when you get an advice from anonymous and irresponsible user of uncertain qualification (like winterm), it's a good point to carefully test the code. Applying it as a style allows you edit, fine-tune it on the fly, turn on/off, even temporarily make changes colored for easier inspecting, etc.

When you're really really sure it's working good, and your old machine suffers from heavily grepped text, you can turn off / delete that GREP style, and use the same code in a simple Find/Change.

Just a good practice, imo.

You're need to edit your font and add additonal symbols into it.

There may be licensing restrictions. Even better, find a suitable font with all required glyphs available.

But it's outside InDesign scope, unless you mean using IndyFont.

[snippy-snappy-chappy]

Thanks guys, this seems a really over complex issue for something Illustrator sorts out automatically.

Ive tried these and for one reason or another they seem to not work (probably me) and as you shouldn't ascend mountains you can't descend so I'm going to bow out here and get another font.

Just seems a real shame.

Tom

[AnneMarie Concepcion]

Hey Tom, I'm curious, what's the font that's missing characters? It's interesting that Illustrator replaces it automatically on the fly while InDesign does not. I'd like to see that in action.

It is possible that Illustrator is faking a font just as InDesign is doing, but Illustrator is not highlighting the substituted font to let you know. If it's the pink highlighting that's objectionable, you could go to InDesign's Preferences and turn it off  (Composition > Substituted Fonts):

AM

[snippy-snappy-chappy]

Hi Annemarie,

Illustrator substitutes the font perfectly with another font and no pink box whereas indesign puts an empty pink box there instead with no substitute font?

The font is The Goldsmith Vintage, its all very strange. It's happened on 2 Macs now so im sure you can replicate.

Tom

[winterm]

[jane-e]

snippy-snappy-chappy  wrote

Hi Annemarie,

Illustrator substitutes the font perfectly with another font and no pink box

Hi Tom,

In Illustrator, can you highlight one of the characters and tell us which font it substitutes? I agree with Her Geekness, aka Ann-Marie, that it is odd that Illustrator would substitute a font.

Jane

[winterm]

As per my own testing, it actually does. Substitutes with Myriad. CS6 on Win7, boxed version.

[jane-e]

Wow, thanks for testing, winterm​. It's good for some users, I suppose, but for me personally I resoundly don't like an automatic font substitution.

[Test Screen Name]

Sounds like a bug in Illustrator to me. Not at all consistent with Adobe’s normal behaviour, and anathema to good typesetting practice.

[snippy-snappy-chappy]

To me it should be the other way around, if I'm designing a poster I dont mind choosing fonts in individual symbols. If writing bulk txt in indesign that becomes a nightmare.

Thanks for the demo wintrim but i must have set something up wrong as i cant seem to get it to work?

Tom

[winterm]

@ jane-e, Test Screen Name:

Absolutely agree here!

@ OP:

Everything you need is in post #3.

Just one thing: that *basic* \W covers too much, I’d recommend to eliminate all white spaces from substitution with this *enhanced* regex:

\W(?<!\s)

[AnneMarie Concepcion]

Tom thanks for the info on the  font! I downloaded it and tested in Illustrator and InDesign, and can confirm what you describe. (Not that I ever doubted you!)

But Illustrator is *not* doing any sort of auto-swapping of a font. It is switching to the default font (Myriad) whenever you try to enter a character that doesn't exist in the (non-default) font you chose. If you dragged out an empty  text frame, switched  the font to Goldsmith, and started typing, your text would appear in Goldsmith. But as soon as you type a character that's doesn't exist in Goldsmith, Illustrator switches to Myriad, and stays in Myriad, even if you enter more characters that do exist in Goldsmith.

Here I started typing in that Goldsmith free display font. When I typed the equals sign, it switched back to its default Myriad Pro font, and stayed there:

InDesign has a different "philosophy" in that it assumes you want all the characters you enter to be in the font you chose. If you enter a character that doesn't exist in that font (pretty rare), you get "the pink box" meaning a missing glyph  (character) in that typeface. If you keep typing, the font remains the one you chose, unlike Illustrator.

I understand you wish InDesign would act like Illustrator, in this case swapping in Minion Pro (its default font) whenever you type a character that doesn't exist, or flow in/paste in text. I can see how that'd be useful. But understand that many more users would howl in protest.

My guess is that the Adobe engineers for InDesign decided designers would rather be alerted for missing glyphs instead of a quiet swap of a different typeface, which would be easy to miss when dealing with lots of text. So in InDesign you'll get pink boxes instead.

You can do a Find/Change or a grep thing as described above to choose a different font the missing glyphs.  (I think Myriad's equal sign glyph looks really weird with Goldsmith, personally.)

Hope that helps, understanding the underlying philosophies ...

AM

[snippy-snappy-chappy]

Thank you all! finally managed to do it and find a nice looking font to go with it. I see what you are saying too but its also worth noting I rang Adobe about this first and they said it wasn't possible so I guess you are all Tom Cruise.

Thanks again.

Tom