OTF versus TT fonts

[Nicola5E49]

I work with a colleague remotely. We both work on the same Indesign documents in the latest version of Indesign and share them via sharepoint by 'Indesign packaging'. When she opens my documents she gets a warning saying the fonts cant be found and the program will use a default font. Her fonts in the font box have (TT) after the name thereafter. When i open her documents i get the same warning and if i skip replacing the fonts I get Lato (OTF) in the font box. Why is this happneing and how can we avoid it? These doucments were mostly created before we activated the Adobe Lato font online. We used to have the Lato font saved on our hard drive in the Indesign program file but not in the most recent Adobe 21 folder because we are using the online activated font. This means when we 'package' the document the fonts are not present in the Fonts folder. help anyone?

[Migintosh]

Font usage varies, depending on operating system and font managers (if you use them). There are different font folders that have different priorities, so please tell us what OS you are using, and how you activate fonts when you get them.

[Nicola5E49]

I'm on Windows 10 Pro, not sure about my colleague. We both have the latest version of Indesign. 2021. We previosuly installed the fonts locally - particularly half the documents are older versions that we periodically update. But recently we have activated Lato through the Adobe fonts. But would there be an issue because the documents started life with using the fonts locally installed?

[tacoeater · Accepted solution]

Hello@Nicola5E49 ,

Technically they are the same font, TTF is just an older standard while OTF is a new standard with in some cases extra features.

You could switch between the fonts, but If nothing has changed with regard to the font then this should have zero impact (But i can't promise this and this wouldn't be a best working practice).

As a tip.

Have you tried going to Type > Find/Replace Font. In here you should be able to find the font in question and link it to the new Adobe Lato. Other wise the other option is Paragraph style are set up you could point the font to the new font there.

How to avoid this.

What you have is multiply users working on the same file, like any where the best way to have a standard on results is to have a standard on the setup on these machines or a standard in work practices.

1. After the design of the document, the file is assessed to see if fonts are needed to be purchased on other machines. So no little surprises at the 11th hour.
2. Optional, only use open type fonts. This creates no problems jumping between machines and no extra costs in sourcing new font licences.

[Nicola5E49]

thanks @tacoeater good infomration. Yes it doesnt appear to have a great impact by what we can see - i think you are right the ystem goes for the other version of the font either of us own, but it would still be great to get rid of the alert and theres always the worry something wont be replaced correctly.

We have used Type > find/replace and also use Paragraph styles, but then when my colleague opens it her end she gets the alert for the opposite so we end up going back and forth - she has recently put up wit hthe alerts so it opens fien for me.

I had thought we won't bother solving it till we can be in the same room with our laptops and compare everything but this is proving delayed with COVID given we live in different states. 

As for the options, yes we both activated the Adobe Lato font hoping this would solve the issue but something is still lurking. I dont know if its because one of us has the local version installed on an older version of Indesign still on our laptops.

[Nicola5E49]

whoops apologies for the typos! I shuld have read back my response first! Have just started work - need more coffee! 

[BobLevine]

Does your co-worker have the the TTF version of the font installed locally? If so, that could be presenting a conflict. Try deactivating it.

[Nicola5E49]

hi Bob, I'll check. We had both installed it locally on previous versions of Indesign but it is not installed locally on the latest version. Would those older ones still be lurking? We have been wondering if we should remove those old versions from our computers anyway.