I’m on windows but had similar issues, what I think is happening is this.

Within each font is a ton of metadata with the font name, family, weight,
opentype names, and alternate names. You can see what I mean here:

View post on imgur.com

Sometimes the font creator is a bit careless about how they fill in these blanks.
If I have Meta Book, and Meta Normal, and Meta Medium… then ideally what I want
is the family name on all three fonts to say “Meta” and then the rest of the blanks
describe what flavor of Meta we’re dealing with.

But some font creators annoyingly put e.g. “Meta-Book” in the book font’s family name,
then “Meta-Medium” in the medium font’s family name, and so on.
Then it will appear as two different families within indesign and other apps.

Your operating system is sometimes smart and figures out that despite the incorrect
family naming method, these fonts all belong together.
So in the Font Book, everything looks good.

Unfortunately, the best fix I’ve found is to actually own a font editing program
(in my case, FontLab, which is available for Mac) and manually redo all the family
names so that they all match, in your case you’d want all of them to say Whitney.
It’s tedious, and probably not realistic if you don’t plan on making fonts
(fontlab is expensive).

You might be able to find a cheap or free program to edit this metadata.
Maybe DTL OTMaster? https://www.fontmaster.nl/english/OTMaster_rdrct.html

And you’ll have even more options if you use WINE or some other windows emulator
that can run windows apps on mac.

For this program and pretty much any program, learning keyboard shortcuts makes your life
a lot easier and makes everything go faster.

I came from using other Adobe products and a little pagemaker + quark.
The number one thing for me in Indesign was understanding how frames work.

I’m sure your class will cover this stuff but if you have the chance to play with indesign early,
before the class, you might find these few simple things let you start making good-looking
documents right away.

—

Everything (text, image, whatever) is sitting in a frame.
Usually the frame is a rectangle but you can get fancy and use circles, ovals, etc.
So, combining the idea “learn keyboard shortcuts” and “learn about frames”:

If you click and drag with the text tool you draw a frame and text will stay inside that box.
If you have too much text for the box, ctrl+alt+C will make the box taller so the overflowing text will appear.

If there’s just too much to realistically show (like it flows several inches off the bottom of the page)
You can click the red [+] on the bottom right of the text box to ‘grab’ the overflow text,
and then click somewhere else (like a new page) to drop that text into a new text box. The boxes are linked
so if you delete lines in the first box, it affects the 2nd box.

If your text fits into a frame with room to spare, the same shortcut ctrl+alt+C will nicely shrink
the text box to fit the text.

You can bring in new text & graphics easily with the standard Adobe shortcut ctrl+D for “place”.
This lets you place image files of many different types… JPEGs, photoshop files, PDFs, even
some non-adobe files like Microsoft Word documents.

When you have an image it sits in a frame too. The frame is used to crop the image, there’s no separate crop
tool like you may be used to in other programs. If you want to crop the image just drag the corners
of the blue frame to hide unwanted areas of the image.
If you crop and image but want to “uncrop” it, our same miracle shortcut ctrl+alt+C will do that,
expanding the frame if it’s hiding part of the image, or shrinking it if the frame is larger than the image.

The thing that confused me when I was new was… “OK but how do I resize the image then?”
In many programs dragging the corners resizes it.
It’s easy, just get used to the keyboard shortcut “E”. Nothing else, just the letter E.
You won’t see much visual difference on the screen (watch the toolbar on the left),
but pressing “E” puts you in ‘resize mode’. Now you can shrink or grow blocks of text or images
by just clicking any corner of the frame and dragging it. Hold shift while dragging to keep things proportional.

If you want to stop resizing press V to return to the default arrow tool, which means
dragging the corner of frames will crop rather than resize.

One more shortcut… you already see ctrl+alt+C is nice for managing the size of the frame.
If you make a frame just the right size but want an image to fit nicely in that frame, ctrl+alt+shift+C.
That way instead of enlarging or shrinking the frame, it will grow or shrink the image inside
to fit the frame.

Good luck with your class ^^

+1 for TerryBurton. Free, fast, supports every possible format, exports to both JPEG and vector EPS.

Is the error it gives “the file may be open or in use”, something like that? Are you part of a network with several computers?

When it happens again you can try pressing “Cmd,” “Opt” and “Esc” together, and see if Adobe Acrobat or the file is listed in there somewhere. You would then choose force quit on it to make sure it's really closed, then hopefully it lets you overwrite.