PDF (adobe.com)

Work with missing fonts



When you open or place documents that include fonts not installed on your system, an alert message appears, indicating which fonts are missing. If you select text that uses a missing font, the Character panel or Control panel indicates that this font is missing by displaying it in brackets in the font style pop‑up menu.

InDesign substitutes missing fonts with an available font. When this happens, you can select the text and apply any other available font. Missing fonts for which others have been substituted will appear at the top of the Type > Font menu in a section marked “Missing Fonts.” By default, text formatted with missing fonts appears in pink highlighting.

If a TrueType font is installed and the document contains a Type 1 (T1) version of the same font, the font is displayed as missing.

You can choose Type > Find Font to find and change missing fonts. If a missing font is part of a style, you can update the font in that style by changing its style definition.

Make missing fonts available

 Do any of the following:

  • Install the missing fonts on your system.

  • Place the missing fonts in the Fonts folder, which is located in the InDesign application folder. Fonts in this folder are available only to InDesign. See Installing fonts.

  • Activate the missing fonts using a font-management application.

If you don’t have access to the missing fonts, use the Find Font command to search for and replace missing fonts.

Highlight substituted fonts in your document

If the Select Substituted Fonts preferences option is selected, text formatted with missing fonts appears in pink highlighting so that you can easily identify text formatted with a missing font.

  1. Choose Edit > Preferences > Composition (Windows®) or InDesign > Preferences > Composition (Mac OS®).
  2. Select Substituted Fonts, and then click OK.