when I open 300-page ID book on new MBP many fonts are wrong. Need font location advice pls.

[Malcolm574]

Hi there,

The main reason I went out on a financial limb to get a new MBP is because it's been getting slower and slower working on my 300-plus page InDesign book on my trusty eleven-year-old MacBook Pro. My new laptop has more RAM and a faster processor and I was so looking forward to zipping around all of my InDesign pages. Unfortunately, I was horrified to open my project on my new MBP only to see that a lot of the fonts had been replaced with fonts that look awful. My book is a complicated patchwork of graphics and images and text blocks galore, and if I had to go through it, page by page, replacing and reconfiguring all the text entries, it would take me months.

But (after pulling out the odd tuft of hair) I realized that the problem must be (and this is something that a more experienced InDesign user would have figured out right away) the fact that fonts that I've gathered over my eleven years on my old MacBook Pro do not exist on my new MBP. So... if I can get all the "missing" fonts onto my new computer, InDesign will see them and I'll be up and running again!

But I'd LOVE to get some advice before I proceed, so that I don't make a mess of things. 

If I make a list of the missing fonts, I can copy them over to my new MBP—but where should I put them? I seem to have a few different 'Fonts' folders in at least a couple of 'Library' folders. Where should I put these 'missing fonts' so that InDesign, when it opens on my new MBP, will see them, and apply them to my book?

Thanks in advance for any advice,

Malcolm

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

May or may not be relevant, but InDesign does not yet run reliably on Sonoma. I don't know enough about the platform to say whether the incompatibilities extend to fonts, but I know ID/Adobe has some special requirements for having fonts installed locally as well as at the system level.

[rob day · Accepted solution]

Hi @Malcolm574 , InDesign and MacOS Sonoma no longer support Type 1 Postscript fonts—they need to be converted to, or replaced with, OpenType (OTF) fonts. See this thread:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/ende-der-unterst%C3%BCtzung-f%C3%BCr-ps-type-1-f...

If your old macBook fonts already are OpenType, then copying them to

⁨Users⁩ ▸ ⁨username⁩ ▸ ⁨Library⁩ ▸ ⁨Fonts⁩

Would make them available to Applications running from your user account

This should make them available to all users:

‎⁨Startup Drive ▸ ⁨Library⁩ ▸ ⁨Fonts⁩

[Malcolm574]

Wow... well, that's good information, Rob. Thank you. I just had a look at some of the fonts in the folder you refer to, and many of them seem to be of the .ttf variety. I just googled .ttf and it seems to me that they are OpenType. So that's good.

I will check out all of the fonts that I've used in my book.

Can you tell me—is there an easy way to do that? With my project open, is there something that will tell me all the fonts that I've used?

One more question, if you don't mind. I'm the only person who uses my computer, so is the Fonts folder in my username/Library folder the one that I should use?

Or might my InDesign project be using the Startup Drive/Library/Fonts folder?

Thanks so much for steering me in the right direction,

Malcolm

[rob day]

One more question, if you don't mind. I'm the only person who uses my computer, so is the Fonts folder in my username/Library folder the one that I should use?

Yes

I just googled .ttf and it seems to me that they are OpenType. So that's good.

.ttf is the extension for TrueType fonts and they should work

With my project open, is there something that will tell me all the fonts that I've used?

With the document open choose Find/Replace Font, click More info to get the font Type and its Path. This is from CC2021 where postscript fonts can be used—Eureka is Type1, and Museo Slab which is Open Type and activated from Adobe Fonts, Adobe’s cloud library which normally is included with a  subscription

[Malcolm574]

Thanks for this info. Here's what I've done with it—

I replaced all the "missing" fonts in each of the three sections (in each case it seemed I was simply replacing a Bold font with a Regular font (of the same font). It seems to have gotten rid of all the error totals in the Preflight Panel), so that's a start.

I then checked all my fonts using the method you suggested, Rob. Here are the results—

I've used 144 fonts in part 1 of my book (I had to break my book into three sections because my laptop is a bit slow, which is why I finally got a new laptop, that I haven't been able to use yet). Almost all of them are TrueType or OpenType TrueType (seven of them are OpenType Type 1). I used 36 fonts in part 2; almost all of them TrueType or OpenType TrueType (two of them are OpenType Type 1); 101 fonts in part 3, almost all of them TrueType or OpenType TrueType (six of them are OpenType Type 1; one of them OpenType CID.

All of these fonts seem to be in one of the three places listed below:

• Library/Fonts
• Users/[me]/Library/Fonts
• System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental

None in my FontBook. None in the Adobe Creative Cloud font library. Should I somehow try to get all of them into the Creative Cloud Library?

Two more notes, that I should have mentioned when I first asked why my InDesign files weren't opening properly on my new MacBook Pro. First, my old MBP is running Big Sur (11.7), while the new MBP is running Sonoma. Second, my version of InDesign on my old MBP is 16.1, whereas the version of InDesign on my new MBP is 19.1

One new problem I've run into since replacing my "missing" fonts in InDesign on my old MBP, is that I can no longer copy my InDesign files anywhere (which I was hoping to do, so that I could try to open these error-free ID documents in InDesign on my new MBP). I get an error message saying: "The Finder can't complete the operation because some date in [each of my three documents] can't be read or written (error code -36)

I'm sorry for such a long post—I'm not sure what information is helpful, and what isn't. 

Does any of this make my predicament any easier to understand?

Thanks for any ideas,

Malcolm

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I've used 144 fonts in part 1 of my book
I used 36 fonts in part 2

101 fonts in part 3

Um.... can I/we ask why?

[Malcolm574]

I absolutely realize it sounds... "over the top". All I can say is that it all works–for this particular project (imho).

[Joel Cherney]

One new problem I've run into since replacing my "missing" fonts in InDesign on my old MBP, is that I can no longer copy my InDesign files anywhere (which I was hoping to do, so that I could try to open these error-free ID documents in InDesign on my new MBP). I get an error message saying: "The Finder can't complete the operation because some date in [each of my three documents] can't be read or written (error code -36)

This error is, I feel certain, completely unrelated to everything else going on here. Some brief searching tells me that it has to do with either the format of your drive or the size of your file. In either case, I would bet that it's not related to InDesign at all.

(If you want, I can send you some links to discussions that might be applicable, but most of the advice boils down to "don't use that thumb drive" or "reformat your thumb drive for macOS using Disk First Aid" or "zip your file first". File size also seems to be important... you don't have an INDD that's larger than 4gb, do you? That would be a potential problem.)

None in my FontBook. None in the Adobe Creative Cloud font library. Should I somehow try to get all of them into the Creative Cloud Library?

It's useful to know where your fonts are, but I suspect that Rob's suggestions for you were more about figuring out if you were relying  on any Type 1 fonts that won't work on your new machine in a new version of InDesign. InDesign will happily use fonts stored in multiple locations, with some caveats, like "don't have two identically named fonts in two different locations or Bad Things Can Happen." You should learn about the way macOS stores fonts, and likewise where InDesign can see fonts. There's a lot of stuff to learn, here, but I'd start with installing fonts on your new system using Font Book.

"Creative Cloud Libraries" are not going to be relevant for this particular question.  You can't store fonts in a CC Library, in any case. The only things that can be stored in a CC Library are "Colors, Color Themes, Paragraph Styles, Character Styles, and Graphics." Since fonts aren't on the list, let's not go down that road right now. 

[Malcolm574]

Joel, thank you. I've been doing a bit of googling on the subject of this error, and I'm sure you're right about it being a Mac (and not an InDesign) issue. I'll try another drive first chance I get. And I will read your link re fonts, and Font Book. As a matter of fact, I was slightly surprised to see that my ID project wasn't using any fonts from FontBook. For my aspy brain, it would be nice if all of my fonts were stored in one place!

[Malcolm574]

Joel, I'm going to look into this—

InDesign will happily use fonts stored in multiple locations, with some caveats, like "don't have two identically named fonts in two different locations or Bad Things Can Happen."

I wouldn't be surprised if I do indeed have the same fonts, with the same names, in more than one font folder. It's the kind of thing I would have done, thinking—if fonts are going missing, maybe I should try them in another folder as well, to double the chances that InDesign will find them.

I will look into this today.

Thanks so much for this advice!

Malcolm

[Malcolm574]

Well, I got rid of some duplicate fonts in the two Fonts folders on my old MBP, then copied all of my fonts to the two Fonts folders on my new MBP... opened my project and... it looks good!  I've yet to dig into it, and at the very least I'm sure I'm going to have to do some major re-linking. But—it looks good, and I couldn't be happier.

Thanks so much, Joel and Rob, for all the generous advice.   

Regards,

Malcolm

[rob day]

Also, this might be more than you need, but here is a deep dive into the MacOS font usage

http://www.jklstudios.com/

[Joel Cherney]

One InDesign tool that might help you out would be to go back to your old machine, open up your InDesign file, and use File -> Package. If you check the right boxes, then InDesign will compile a Document Fonts folder with all the fonts you used in that document, a Links folder with all of the placed images in that document, and if you want them, it'll export PDF and/or IDML, and save the whole collection to a new folder. That way, it'll be easy to move all of your fonts to your new machine - assuming, of course, that they're not Type 1 fonts, as Rob has already pointed out. 

[Malcolm574]

Thank you Joel. I will do that. 

I might end up having to finish this book on my old laptop, as all the fonts work perfectly well on it. It's true, some seem to go "missing" on occasion, which I've never understood, because I select all my fonts from the drop-down menu in InDesign, but I've learned that even if the PreFlight window says that some fonts are missing, my project will export and print properly nevertheless. 

But I'll do my best to get all the right kind of fonts in one Fonts folder (or maybe I'll put all of them in both Fonts folders) on my new MBP, and I'll see if my InDesign project will then load properly. That might solve my problem. Or, of course, it could be that InDesign and Sonoma aren't yet compatible as James Gifford said.

Thanks so much for your help,

Malcolm