Mass Font Errors When Changing Fonts

[greyowlstudio]

Hello to All,

I'm working on a big RPG book with a lot of fiddly changes. It's very complex, and the only thing I can compare it to is an encyclopedia with charts, illustrations, bold and italicized text, variations of every type of indentation, bulleted lists, and many different types of illustrations. I'm doing my layout using Paragraph and Character Styles, of course, but I'm also required to do a lot of overrides in order to alter certains words to either italics or bold or semibold. I need a font that has semibold for this, which limits my font options.

The problem is that the client is very finicky about fonts and cannot make up his mind about what he likes. I've had to change the font several times, and, each time I do, I get literally hundreds of font errors in the Preflight window. Despite changing the font in my Styles, some font characteristics do not match up regardless.

The reason for this appears to be that the current font is ITC Stone Std, which has a "Medium Italic" rather than simply "Italic", so when I change the font in my Styles it gets confused and cannot match up "Medium Italic" to "Italic." Each of these instances requires me to click on the invidivual error and change it manually, one at a time, which, as you can imagine, is a huge pain in the butt!

The program does not allow me to correct these errors en mass. I cannot select all of them at once using the shift or control key.

Is there anyway to tell InDesign to select all instances of orphaned fonts and specify what I want to change them to all at once? If there's no way to do this, then it seems like a big oversight on the part of the programmers.

Thank you for your help,

Michael

[Barb Binder · Accepted solution]

Hi Michael:

Are you taking advantage of the Based on feature when you define your styles? This sets up a parent child relationship between styles so that you can edit the parent style and all the children will update automatically. It's meant for this specific situation.

I'm doing my layout using Paragraph and Character Styles, of course, but I'm also required to do a lot of overrides in order to alter certains words to either italics or bold or semibold. 

This sentence confuses me because this is the exact purpose of a character style—a character style is applied to words within a paragraph to differentiate them. 

Have you used Type > Find Font yet? That will allow you to use Find/Change to modify fonts, and there is a checkbox to redefine styles as you do it. 

~Barb

[greyowlstudio]

Thank you for that, Barb. Your question prompted exactly what was needed in my mind. I was stupidly using manual overrides for my exceptions rather than Character Styles. I was using Character Styles for Nested Styles but not for anything else. Anyway, I immediately saw what I was doing wrong thanks to your respone. I'm not exactly new to InDesign but I've never done anything this in depth before.

Thanks again,

Michael

[Willi Adelberger]

I was also confused by the same sentence as Barb.

My question is, do you use Character Styles only for exceptions or everywhere?

Why do you have manual overrides and not character styles. I NEVER use manual overrides, only styles.

When you replace fonts, why do you not use find font with redefine styles, of course, no manual overrides should be there.

[greyowlstudio]

I just wasn't thinking. Barb's question jolted me out of my ignorance and I had to go through the entire file and clear all manual overrides and replace them with Character Styles. Every instance of certain words needs to be italicized, so it took me many hours to fix, but I got it done.

Thanks for your help.

Michael