When you don't have the font
A question we get a lot: why does my file look different when the font is missing?
Here is the short answer. Publisher does not tell you a font is missing. It quietly picks a replacement and carries on. Every font has its own letter widths, so the replacement pushes words to different places, which moves line breaks, which moves everything below. Nothing looks broken. It just looks like someone else set the page.
We copy Publisher's substitution, not our own
Any converter has to pick a stand in font. Most pick a sensible one. We pick the one Publisher picks, because matching Publisher is the whole job.
Three fixes this month came out of that:
Optima now maps to Calibri. That is the same swap Publisher makes, so pages set in Optima now break where they broke before.
A phantom Helvetica substitution is gone. For some files we were quietly switching to Helvetica when we should not have. Those files now keep the face they asked for.
Face measurements are read Publisher's way. Every font carries its own numbers for how far letters reach above and below the line. We read those numbers wrong for several common faces, Gill Sans MT and bold Times New Roman among them. A first line sat about a point high, and every line under it inherited the error. Fixed, so first lines start where Publisher starts them.
There was one more, on the Word side. Word ignores the "alternate name" hint that Publisher files use to suggest a fallback, so we now write the family our engine actually resolved. What you open is what you see.
A tip if you own the font
The PDF export embeds whatever we resolved, so a PDF is safe to send anywhere. For Word and IDML, install the font 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 how font choices move text: the case of the wrong font size.
Got a file with an unusual font? Preview any file free.