When you do have the font
Last time we wrote about what happens when a font is missing. Publisher picks a stand-in without telling you, every letter changes width, and the page quietly resets itself.
This post is the other half of that story. A lot of the time the font isn't really missing. It's an ordinary Windows face that the document has every right to expect. The problem was on our side: our converter didn't recognize it, so it measured the text with a stand-in and the page moved anyway.
That got a lot better this month.
Recognition is most of the job
Our converter now recognizes a much wider set of the faces that real Publisher documents ask for, and it lays their text out with those faces' own character widths and line heights instead of approximating with something close.
That sounds like a small distinction. It isn't. Character widths decide how many words fit on a line. Line heights decide how far apart the lines sit. Get both from the real face and the paragraph breaks where Publisher broke it, the column ends where Publisher ended it, and the page under it doesn't drift. Get them from a stand-in and everything below the first line is off by a little more with every line.
So the win here isn't a cleverer guess. It's needing to guess less often.
One file, before and after
We checked this on a real document the day it went live. A church postcard, ordinary body text, nothing exotic about it.
The old output set that body text in bold italic. Not a little heavier. Bold italic, all the way through, on a card where Publisher sets it plain. It looked like a styling bug and it wasn't one. Once the converter recognized the face the card actually asks for, the text came out plain, at the right weight, and the card matched what Publisher's own PDF export produces.
An honest correction
While we were measuring this, we found that we'd overstated the problem.
Our census said that font mismatches explained about 18 percent of the gap on a difficult band of files. When we looked harder, our measuring tool was recording one face per document, not every face a document uses. Fixing the tool cut the real figure to roughly 9 percent. Still worth the work, and we did the work. But it was half the size we told ourselves it was, and the number we published internally was wrong.
We would rather correct that here than quietly move on from it.
If you own the font
Nothing changes about the advice from last time. The PDF export carries what we resolved, so a PDF is safe to send anywhere. For Word and IDML, install the font on your own machine first, then set the original font name back on the text. Word and InDesign relink to the real face and the page reflows the way it was designed.
More on why a font change moves a whole page: why lines break where they do.
Got a file with an unusual typeface? Preview it free.