Rotis Semi Sans no longer supported!

Forum|Forum|5 months ago
October 27, 2025
4 replies
827 views

We purchased full family of a type one font, Rotis Semi Sans, 17 years ago as our design choice for branding of our church's magazine, leaflets, posters etc which was a large outlay for us. Until this year we used InDesign CS5 and now have upgraded to the subscription version only to find we can no longer use the Rotis Semi Sans. - does anyone know how to get around this or where the is a newer version of Rotis which we can use? (which isn't highly expensive)

Peter Spier

Community Expert

While I;'m sure you will hear a lot of negativity about this from otheres here, there's actaully no reason why you need to use the new version of InDesign to do your newsletter if the old one was adequated to your needs and you still have it installed and running. Old versions that supported Type 1 fonts continue to work and suppport those fonts.

BobLevine

Community Expert

Right. The problem is the hardware and operating systems have advanced to a point where getting those old versions to work is a big issue, especially with the activation servers shut down.

Peter Spier

Community Expert

You presume the hardware that ran the old version has disappeared. My point is that if the old system is still running and available it didn't become unusable just because Adobe issued some upgrades.

rob day

Community Expert

does anyone know how to get around this or where the is a newer version of Rotis which we can use?

I can confirm that TransType will convert the old 1990 1.000 version of Rotis. If you need the font metrics to be identical—no reflowing of existing documents—converting might be your best option.

If you don’t care about an exact style match, your Adobe subscription comes with the Adobe Type Library, which is extensive and has some Rotis look alikes—see FF Dax. The advantage of Open Type is a font can have large glyph sets—no more need for extra expert fonts when you need true small caps and old style figures.

https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/ff-dax

Randy Hagan

Community Expert

If your Rotis Semi Sans is a Postscript Type 1 font, there's probably no way around using it with the latest versions of InDesign CC.

Adobe InDesign stopped support of Postscript fonts nearly 3 years ago. The alternative is to either buy an OpenType version of your font (Monotype sells a six-font set of its Rotis Semi Sans typeface for roughly $190 at this site online), or alternatively, use a font utility to translate the Postscript fornt into OpenType format. One recommended highly by folks is called TransType, which is available here for less than $100. There are other utility software/services for font translation, including free ones, with varying degrees of success.

Hope this helps,

Randy

S

spire-ststephAuthor

Participant

Thank you for your reply, it gives me some options to explore as I start on our Christmas stuff. It came as a bit of a shock to think I had to change so much of how we appear. - ever wondered why you ever upgraded?

Randy Hagan

Community Expert

I have. It's always a push on me/pull me along battle between me and software upgrades. I generally do it when my clients have forced me into coming along whether I want to or not. And while I do grumble and beef about it sometimes, it's generally worth the trip.

But I'll always wait a week or two before upgrading to the latest version of any software, and carefully read the forums like this to see if there are any bugs/conflicts in the latest upgrade before I upgrade. There's no shame in letting early adopters find the problems, then waiting for the software publisher to fix them before following suit and upgrading my own systems. I say this as Adobe's holding its Woodstock Experience, Adobe MAX, and will undoubtedly be introducing new versions of most all its graphic design software this week.

Randy