Replacing Helvetica with Nimus Sans - glyphs don't substitute

Question

Hello Community. I am having to replace our Helvetica font and it was suggested that Nimus Sans was a likely substitute for it. However, when I change the font from one to the other, none of the Nimbus Sans glyphs are substituted, even though I see them in the glyphs panel. These include the ff and apostrophe. Obviously I cannot start resetting all of our documents with this happening. Can anyone give me either a way to force those glyphs to replace the ones they are substituting or suggest a different font that is similar to Helvetica?

Thanks for any help! (Using a Windows 10 PC and latest InDesign)

GS

Peter Spier · Accepted Answer

If you're not using styles — if you don't have styles applied to every paragraph, with no local overrides (those should be Character Styles, without exception)...

You're going to have a long slog updating the type in all your documents.
This is the reason you learn and use styles.

Maybe a good time to redo each document correctly, creating appropriate styles and applying them as you update the fonts. The "fingerpainting" method that Word all but encourages is really, really bad practice in professional layout in general and ID in particular.

I suspect if you update the styles and remove overrides, nearly any font you choose will work correctly. There are very few font families that don't have (and correctly map) the basic 200 or so glyphs, including ligatures. You have to get into amateur-made fonts or ones for other languages before you really find missing pieces, in most cases.

—

Another nethod for changing fonts that's better than highlighting text (and probably faster than editing styles even when you use them) would be to use Type > Find Font... and make the substitutions there. This will fix ALL instances of the fonts you want to cange in one go per font, and if you check the box to redefine styles it will take care of fixing all of them for you as well.

Laubender · Answer

@Graphic Squirrel said: " However, when I change the font from one to the other, none of the Nimbus Sans glyphs are substituted, even though I see them in the glyphs panel."

Ok, this is an odd problem.

Seems that the code points for the glyphs are different in both fonts.

Is the Nimbus Sans activated from Adobe Fonts?

Could you post a sample InDesign document where Helvetica is used?

Maybe the issue is with the used version of the Helvetica? Could be an older one.

I'm also on Windows 10 with the latest InDesign.

FWIW: A forum admin should change the title of this thread from "Nimus Sans" to "Nimbus Sans"…

Regards,
Uwe Laubender
( Adobe Community Professional )

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded