Open documents changing font on subsequent templates

[mikmak]

Ladies, Gents, guru's one and all,



There are a few steps I followed here to identify the problem so let me lay them out first.

There are 5 documents:
Doc A = .dot with "Frutiger 45 Light" font style, as provided by my customer. (master hosted on Sharepoint)
Doc B = Local (C drive) copy of Doc A.
Doc C = .doc Export from our own Enterprise Software.
Doc D = Another word doc. but with Calibri body text
Doc E = Export by a colleague from our own Enterprise Software.

I had Doc B open and then did an export from our software (creating Doc C) and the font was "Futiger 45 Light".

My colleague sent me Doc E which he needed printed. His export was the same as Doc C except his font has Calibri.

I closed all Docs except Doc E, then opened Doc A to check the font, and it had changed to Times New Roman (corresponding with my colleagues export).

I closed all docs, then opened Doc A and the font was again, Frutiger 45 Light! I then checked other templates on Sharepoint and found them all to be in Frutiger 45 Light.

NOTE: It is not Frutiger 45 Light!

After doing some further investigation, I have realised that I am using MS Office 2007 on XP and my colleagues are using Office 2010 on Windows7. Sooooo, I'm guessing that since none of us have the correct font, our versions are reverting to whatever the default font is for our versions.

Is the only fix for us to get Frutiger 45 Light? I guess this will be required since all of our exports will have to fit in with the customers other documents.

Thanks in advance for any assistance! I'm really scratching my head!

[vswingfield]

You have discovered the disadvantage of using unusual fonts. You may try embedding the fonts when you save the documents, see the instructions here.

The ultimate solution is for everyone who need the unusual font to have it installed.

You are correct that when Word does not have the font, it reverts to the default, but it still may say the name of the missing font in the fonts formatting window.

I have seen this at the university where I work. For many years, the officially specified font did not even exist for Windows, only Mac. The vast majority of computers on campus were then, and are even more so now, overwhelmingly Windows computers. It drove us crazy. We just used Times New Roman and ignored the requirements. Doesn't sound like you have that option.

If you are working on things for customers that require you to use that font, buy it and consider it part of the cost of doing business. Pass that cost on to the customer, too. It's a legitimate expense.

On edit, I found it very quickly on a free download site using Google.

[mikmak]

Thanks for your response. I guess I will have to buy it.

Though there are many google links alleging free downloads, they are usually long registration strings eventually asking for your credit card.

Filetubes.com even has a disclaimer saying they do not guarantee the presence of the file, so after you hand over your hard earned dollars (despite the supposed free 14 day period, which actually costs you 49 AUD) you may find you signed up for nothing......

[macropod]

Hi mikmak,

The Frutiger 45 Light font is not a freeware font - it's owned and sold by Linotype through fonts.com (see: http://www.fonts.com/findfonts/detai...roductid=44998). At least if you get it from there it's only USD29. As vswingfield said, though, if your colleague embeds the font into their document (if that's possible - some fonts don't allow embedding), you don't need to obtain a copy just to print it.

Another option is to agree upon a similar standard Windows font and use that.

Yet another option is to modify the windows font substitution settings to use that alternative font when a document using the Frutiger 45 Light font is received. There are various Windows fonts that look quite similar, including Arial, though I'm not sure whether the Arial & Frutiger fonts have the same physical sizes as their point sizes indicate.

[mikmak]

Thanks for your input Paul. That was my main concern (physical characteristics). The appearance is of little consequence to me, as we are delivering technical maintenance advice and strategy. I just wanted to make sure that it would fit on the page in the same manner as it is constructed. Oddly enough, the customer wants it in PDF AND .doc.

Aah, to be a customer. What a world of whimsy it must be.

[macropod]

Hi mikmak,

Any font substituion is liable to affect the page layout - and so too is opening the document on a computer whose active printer is anything other than the one that was active when the document was last saved. Even with the same printer, differences in the printer driver and its setup can affect the page layout. That's because Word uses information from the printer driver to work out how to best layout the document to fit the printer's abilities.

[mikmak]

Ah ha! Thank you. Either the customer knew this (hence the request from PDF) or just a stroke of luck on their behalf.

[mikmak]

Ladies and Gents,

Thanks for your help thus far. I was going to change this thread to "solved" but I have one further question:

If we are editing the document without Futiger, and create a .PDF, then return the word document and the PDF to the customer, will they see the actual Futiger font in both documents or will the PDF appear to contain my default font?

Thanks again for your help.