TypeTalk: The Case of the Mysterious Missing Fonts

Ilene Strizver

Q. I’ve noticed some strange font behavior in some of my documents. Sometimes unused fonts show up in the font directory, or are listed as a missing font. Other times, the point size field remains blank when I highlight type that I know is a certain size; the same thing occasionally happens with line spacing. Can you explain this?
A. This mysterious font behavior can be summed up by the following statement: Spaces have attributes, too!
Now let’s address these odd behaviors one at a time.
Mystery fonts often turn up when you create a document from another one (as in Save As…) or from a template, and then change the fonts. If even one tiny space (not a character, but a space) isn’t converted to the new font, your page-layout software thinks that the original font is still in that document. If the font is auto-activated and/or available for use, you might not know it’s there until you collect the fonts, or do some other action that reveals it presence. But when you open the document and that unused font is missing, you’ll get a warning, which can be mystifying.
To check for or eliminate a mystery font (a good idea for all documents), go to the font listing for your document. (In InDesign, that’s Type > Find Font; in QuarkXPress that’s Utilities > Usage.) Then select any mystery or missing fonts and choose Find First (InDesign) or Show First (Quark). This command shows you the space (or sometimes even a character or word) that’s set in the mystery font. Once located, you can change the font to one used in the document and the old font will disappear from the list… and your document.
Now if a point size or line spacing field remains blank when you highlight text — even though you think you know the point size and/or the line spacing — most likely a nasty space remains in that text in a different setting. This happens when you manually highlight text to change its attributes, but leave out a space that might be at the beginning or the end of a word, line, or sentence.
To solve this, highlight smaller sections of the text in question until you find the offending space, and then change it to match the rest. Or simply highlight the entire setting and type in the point size and/or line spacing you think it should be. Then everything — even the mystery space — will be consistent. But if you see a visible change in the text, something was probably not consistent to begin with, and you might have to go back and find the problem manually.
You can use this same method for locating and fixing any missing or inconsistent attributes, such as tracking and baseline shifts.
Figure 1. The highlighted section of text is set in 20/25 ITC Aram.

Figure 2.When the entire text is highlighted, some attributes remain blank, indicating that there’s more than one font, size, and line spacing being used here.

Figure 3.The offending mystery space (circled in the text) has totally different attributes: 18/22 ITC Deli Deluxe, which is probably left over from an earlier setting. The brackets indicate that it is a missing.

Figure 4.InDesign’s Find Font shows ITC Deli Deluxe as missing in this document with the yellow warning icon, even though it isn’t being used by any any glyphs.

Love type? Want to know more? Ilene Strizver conducts her acclaimed Gourmet Typography workshops internationally. For more information on attending one or bringing it to your company, organization, or school, go to her site, call The Type Studio at 203-227-5929, or email Ilene at [email protected]. Sign up for her e-newsletter at www.thetypestudio.com.