From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

Using Find Font - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign 2024 Essential Training

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Using Find Font

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- [Instructor] How do you know what fonts are being used inside your document? It's kind of important information to know. Fortunately, InDesign has one place that you can go to get all that information, it's called Find/Replace Font, and you can find it up here in the Type menu. When you choose Find/Replace Font, up comes this dialog box, and it gives you a list of all the fonts you've used in your document, and not just the fonts, but even the styles within the font families. So you can see we have this font, Montserrat, but also in Medium, Regular, SemiBold, and so on. Down here at the bottom of the list, you can see we're also using Myriad Pro Regular. I didn't expect that, so let's go and find out where. I'll click it to select it, and then I'll click the Find First button. InDesign jumps right to that page and selects the text. Let's move this out of the way, so we can see what's going on. There it is. Now, that's obviously a mistake, this word should not be in that font, but that would be hard to find if I were proofing by eye, so it's so great that this feature can point it out for me. Of course, now that I've found it, I also want to replace it. And I could just change this one instance manually, but what if that font showed up a dozen times in this file? So to change this from one font to another, I'm going to use the Replace With feature here inside this dialog box. For example, let's choose the proper font here, Montserrat, and we'll just choose Light from the Font Style popup menu. Now, when you do this, it's a really good idea to turn on this checkbox, Redefine Style When Changing All. This forces InDesign not to just change it on my document and parent pages, but also to go inside the paragraph and character styles and change it there too. That's really important. I'll be talking about styles in a later chapter, but believe me, you want to turn that checkbox on. All right, let's go ahead and click Change All, and it quickly goes through the entire document and changes the fonts. You may also get this little alert saying, "Overrides have been applied to one or more styles." That's okay, you could just ignore this warning, just close it and move on. Oh, one other thing about this dialog box I want to point out. Let's go ahead and select one of these fonts, and now, I'll click the More Info button. This gives you all kinds of information about the font itself, the fact that it was activated from Adobe Fonts, what pages it shows up on, what the character count is, all kinds of stuff. Now, in this case, it doesn't really help me that much, but I wanted to point out that this is there. I always check Find/Replace Font before finishing a document, because you would be surprised at how often other fonts sneak in. Oh, there's one more thing about fonts I need to tell you. Sometimes, when you open a document, InDesign will alert you that the file contains a font that you don't have. For example, let's click Done here, and then go up to the File menu and choose a different file. Here inside my Exercise Files folder, I'm going to choose the Magazine_alternate. When I click Open, up comes this dialog box saying you don't have this font. Now, in this case, InDesign can see that the font that's missing is actually part of my Creative Cloud subscription, and it's offering to activate the font for me. I could do that by clicking Activate, or I could click Replace Fonts to go back to that dialog box we were just looking at. But in this case, I'll click Skip, because I really want to show you one more way to see that a font is missing. I'll jump out of preview mode by pressing the W key. And see how all this text is highlighted? This is what professionals call the dreaded pink. The pink highlighting means InDesign does not know how to display those characters, in this case, because it doesn't have the right font. You want to avoid the dreaded pink. So in this case, I'll go back to Find/Replace Font in the Type menu, and I'll choose that font. You can see that the font is missing, because it has this little alert symbol. To fix this, let's go ahead and click Activate. Now, Creative Cloud goes out, grabs the font, downloads it, and installs it on my computer. This might take 30 seconds or a minute, depending on your connection, but as soon as it's done, the find font dialog box updates, the font gets turned on in the background again, so we can click Done, and now, we're good to go.

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