Keep your layouts consistent and printable by making missing fonts available to InDesign.
What you'll need
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What you learned: Recognize and fix missing fonts in an Adobe InDesign document
When you open an InDesign file, whether it’s your own or from someone else, you might see a Missing fonts dialog box. This means that the file uses fonts that you don’t currently have on your computer. Unless you fix the missing fonts, wherever fonts are missing in the document, a default font will be substituted in. Substituting fonts can affect the layout, so it’s important to fix the issues.
Missing Adobe fonts
In order to use an Adobe font on your system, it needs to be activated. If you open a document that uses Adobe fonts that are not activated on your system, the Missing fonts dialog box appears. By default, text formatted with missing fonts has pink highlighting to show where fonts are missing.
- In the Missing fonts dialog box, any Adobe and non-Adobe fonts are listed if they are missing. To fix missing Adobe fonts, select the checkbox for each that you want to activate. Click Activate.
Tip: You can enable Adobe font auto-activation, so when an InDesign document contains any missing fonts, they are automatically activated in the background. To enable the option, on macOS, choose InDesign > Preferences > File handling, or on Windows, choose Edit > Preferences > File handling and select Auto-activate Adobe Fonts.
Fix missing local fonts
If a document you open uses a local font not installed on your computer, the Missing fonts dialog box appears, as with missing Adobe fonts. The best way to fix missing local fonts is to install the missing fonts on your computer. Otherwise, you can replace fonts using the following method.
- In the Missing fonts dialog box, click Replace fonts to replace the missing fonts manually.
- In the Replace fonts dialog box, select a font that is missing. To see where it’s used in the document, click Find first to highlight the first instance of the font in the document.
- Choose a font family and style in the Replace with section to replace the missing font with. Click Change all to change them all or Change/Find to replace the font in the highlighted instance and jump to another instance.
It’s important to make sure fonts aren’t missing in your InDesign documents. Using these methods for replacing missing fonts, you can ensure that your layout looks as you intend.
