My Own Font Catalog and Fast!

[uzapuca]

Hi guys,

My boss ask me if I can present a font chart where i place every fonts in many different sizes, bold, italic, all caps and also try them with paragraphs with different spaces and tracking to check the best one.

We do have quite many of them, so to avoid a quite boring job, i would like to know if after i made the chart in an InDesign A4 file, let´s say i chose Garamond for the first chart and apply the same characteristic to Helvetica in the next page and so for.

Is there any way that i select all the different font boxes an apply a different font name to the whole page without going text by text and paragraph by paragraph? Maybe there is some script or way of doing this very mechanical and boring task.

Thanks a lot for any idea.
Best regards,
Sebastiao

[uzapuca]

The idea more or less is to do something like this

http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1RAMSRrZA8GeyrrMbkyjbxrBYNa20

with the advantage that just changing with a click the font which used to be Garamond family for example will be helvetica. That can give a fast understanding of the font shape and how it behaves with differents trackings and spacings, which is more control over than just printing the font as a catalog.

[DCurry]

You wouldn't need to select any type to change the font - just go to Type>Find Font and change it there. You'd have to use a different document for each font, but you could combine them when you are done.

[uzapuca]

Hi DCurry,

Thanks for the tip, it is a good idea! however is still too time consuming, i believe. For example suppose that you have this sample that i am working on:

http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1udvYBNMWf7W6Gdi6twWRVnriFFsX0

If i have to change every type of font, Roman, Italic, Bold each time it will take for ever. I was kind of looking on way maybe making some Paragraph Style or script that will allow me to change all the Times New Roman fonts into Helvetica at once. Relating Times Italics to Helvetica Italics and so for.

Do you think that is possible in other way than doing it one by one?

Cheers,
Sebastiao

[eugenetyson]

I think in the amount of time you've waited for an answer on this you could have set this up and be done with it. But that's just me.

For me, anytime I start a project I look at what things I repeat a lot. Then I just find a way to stop the repetition and get on with the formating. As I work through projects I find shortcuts and ways of doing things that are unique to a certain project.

As you will find if you start doing it. You'll see what works and what doesn't work and how to do it sensibly after about the 10th font of setting it up manually you'll start to figure out ways to do it quicker.

I don't think it's fair to come on and ask someone to devise a method for you, we might as well do the project if that's the case.

I think a fairer approach would to start the project and then where you feel you have pitfalls or want a faster way to approach a situation then ask how you can fix that problem.

Hope this doesn't come across as rude. I'm just trying to help. The quickest way to learn is to try and do it yourself and devise your own work methodology and then when something really stumps you, then hit in with a question.

I know you're pressed for time. But you should tell your boss that it will take time to do this and that's the right answer. No point in filling your boss's head with lies and false hope.

[uzapuca]

Hi Eugentyson,

Thanks for you advice on how to use my time, anyhow if you have 50 fonts and want to do a good quality FONT SPECIMEN template that works for each one you should use a good work flow by not going one by one, I dunno, just me.

I do not find you reply as rude, but rather you did not give me any interesting or insightful information. Sorry if that sound rude, but is true. I was asking for ways to solve an specif process with a Technical Solution in InDesign since i am kind of new to this software.

Luckily for me someone that did not get caught in rhetorical of words gave me a great solution to this specific problem. I post it here just if can help another because that is what i believe is the purpose of a forum, people sharing the little or lot of their knowledge with each other to improve EVERYONE knowledge rather than making off topic observations.

[I]"Michael Trout
Well, one thought that could assist you should you have to go the route of creating a 'font book' is to make extensive use of styles. Ensure that all your text is styled with a paragraph style based on a master style (called base font for example). Create related paragraph styles of Bold, Italic, Paragraph Sample, etc. Base all of them on the 'base font' style.

Change the font family on the 'base font' style to change the font on all paragraph styles based on it.

If the font family does not have a specific (or similar) font style associated with it, then you will be presented with the 'pink box' indicating a missing font face.

I tested this using Myriad Pro, Helvetica LT Std, Times, and Impact. The styles called upon were reflected in the sample text. Myriad Pro Italic became Times Italic, then Helvetica Oblique. Impact showed the pink boxes for the Italic face since there isn't such a font style on my Mac.

A negative thought is that this changes it document wide, so each font face you want to sample would need a new document. However, you could assemble them with a book (.indb) for easy export to PDF or group printing. (just be sure NOT to sync the styles ^_~)."

Cheers,
Sebastiao

[eugenetyson]

Yes I see what you mean. But really that solution that has been offered seems to be the best solution, in my opinion.

You can probably get a script made up to automate the creation of character styles and nested styles but you would have to pay for it as it's quite specialist thing to do.

Best thing to do if you want to automate the process is to research some InDesign Script writers and see if they will give you a price for what you're looking for.

Otherwise you'd have to create all the character styles yourself, then create the paragraph styles etc., yourself, by hand.

It's not a task I would like to take on and I'd probably just tell them to hump off.

[eugenetyson]

I just took a trip over to Adobe Exchange, a great resources for scripts. I found these.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&extid=1046567

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&extid=1046520

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&extid=1046401

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&extid=1046671

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&extid=1046470

Not sure if it's of any use, but could be worth a look or a combination of these, I'm not sure though, it's a start.

[The Repro Kid]

From the samples posted it really doesn't look that overwhelming. Either of the pages could be set up to use style sheets as perviously suggested. Then every time you edit the style sheet to change a font, you could export the page as a PDF, and then just combine all the PDFs to make a final book. Then it doesn't matter what fonts are saved to the styles, the original InDesign file becomes a dummy to generate PDFs with what ever fonts you have.

Eugene has a point though, once you actually start to do the work, ideas that help streamline the process will follow naturally and also help you determine just what exactly it is you need. Using Find Font might also be just as fast as editing the style sheets. However, asking InDesign to look into a folder of fonts and start substituting them one by one is something the program is not designed for, so you have to have scripting invloved or move it to specialized program, where you'll lose the ability to design such intricate specimen pages.

Remember that when you go to print it, you might want to print the book in sections, fonts get downloaded to the printer before printing, and a document will try to download all fonts before printing, until the printer's memory is full, so printing long font books can spin out the printer as it tries to load and print all the different fonts.

[uzapuca]

thanks for the scripts guys, very useful info!

Best,
Sebastiao