Is there a way to manually tell LayOut which font I want it to substitute for one that it thinks I’m missing? My dad and I work together, and he uses Stone Sans a lot. When I open his LayOut files on my PC, all the text in Stone Sans shows up in Veranda, because I don’t have Stone Sans on my hard drive.
I actually do have it, but the file name isn’t exactly the same. Trying to change the file name to match is a maddening dead end, and finding the exact same download source he originally used has proved to be difficult too. To complicate matters, he uses a Mac whereas I’m on Windows.
What I would like to do is more or less tell LayOut to use my Stone Sans font in stead of Veranda, whenever it can’t find the version of Stone Sans it’s looking for. It seems like a feature LayOut would have, but I haven’t been able to find it in menus.
Why not replace your copy of the font with the one your father has on his computer? Then you don’t have to worry about font substitution at all.
That’s a good thought. Is there not then a way to mass-replace fonts in a file? Find and replace all Veranda with Stone Sans, for example?
I don’t know if Windows and Mac versions of Truetype or OTF font files are identical. The problem is also that the name of a font is not the font file name but it is embedded in the file itself, so you would need to use a font editor to change it.
You can select all the text on a page and change the font in one go but if you don’t have to deal with it in the first place it’ll save you work.
I guess I must be doing it wrong, then. I work between Windows and Mac. I just make sure I have the same fonts installed on both machines and I don’t have any issues. There’s only a few I use in LayOut projects and they’ve all worked just fine.
My thoughts as well; the files we work on have about a dozen pages apiece, with a myriad of text boxes in two or three different fonts, depending. Sifting through all of them and manually replacing each Veranda with Stone Sans would be a big waste of time.
If the font is specified as Stone Sans, and just rendered as Verdana, no replacement should be necessary? When opened on a computer with the real Stone Sans installed, it would be displayed again with it?
If instead you used something like search-and-replace, you specify a different font, which changes the file and your dad will have the same problem.
That would work. I’m trying to find a way to get it to work without having the “real” Stone Sans installed, though, since getting it is proving to be difficult. It’s sounding like there’s not a search-and-replace feature though, or a way to convince LayOut to view the differently-named Stone Sanses as interchangeable.
What about giving you Dad the version that you are using rather than trying to figure out how to import his? Make sure it’s a new version of True Type or Open type if you are on Mac.
I hate shooting down all these good ideas, but I guess I’m in a pretty unique circumstance. That will work for future files, but he’s got a lot of projects started already and the bulk of my job requires me to open those files and get them ready for clients’ approval. Things like font choice and size are pretty crucial for when I’m making things look pretty.
Be able to control font replacement in LO is a must feature request for me.
For me too. I use two fonts. One of them is no longer available with the same name. All my old layout files are using it and when I open them the font gets randomly replaced.
As I have two fonts spread all over, If I replace all fonts all my drawings will be mesed up.
Replacing so many ndividual text blocks is just crazy.
This feature is also very useful for sharing files between offices that use different standards.
Thia kind of details are the ones that lead people to state that Layout is not production ready and though I use it for production, I must agree with some of those statements…
I have, on occasion replaced fonts by editing the XML files. It’s not difficult and it’s faster than opening and selecting the text boxes that need to be changed on each page.
I will try that! Thanks Dave!
Edit: though I think the feature should still be made available…
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