InDesign loses Formats when converting text to paths

[maltep]

Hi everyone,

I a have another tricky one for your developers . I just had to convert a bit of text with several formats to paths. First problem happened with the bullet points of a list (or to be precise the Guillemets I used instead, font is Fira Sans) which vanished the moment the text was converted. The second problem happens with a chracter format which specified a colour and was over a paragraph format which spcified Italics. When converted the text was coloured but not italic any more ?!!

[Derek Cross]

You are not asking Adobe on this forum, we are volunteers. If you have a bug or feature request use this form:

Wishform - Adobe InDesign

What is the purpose of converting your text?

[maltep]

Sorry, did not know that. But its a bit misleading when there is an Adobe Logo in the upper left corner. I reported the bug to the official adobe Site.

The reason for converting was to copy the layout into a document with another size without having to set up new formats and so on.

[Willi Adelberger]

There exists no reason to convert fonts to outlines. Don't do it.

You can place an INDD or an exported PDF/X-4 from InDesign to any other InDesign file. It works well with live font. No reason to convert to outlines.

Convert to outlines makes only sense if you want to do some things like filling a letter with a picture or transform a letter.

[winterm]

Willi Adelberger  wrote

Convert to outlines makes only sense if you want to do some things like filling a letter with a picture...

Huh, even in this case it's not always necessary and acceptable. Say, you want Auto Page Numbers filled with bitmap texture... There are some techniques (well, not so flexible) to accomplish this without outlining anything.

maltep​,

If you, despite of everything said above, still badly badly need to follow that *terrible practice* - export your pdf 'normally' and outline fonts in Acrobat! At least you won't loose your bullets, etc.

[Derek Cross]

Dov Isaacs put it like this:

Converting text to outlines is considered by Adobe and most experts in the community as exceptionally poorworkflow practice:

(1)     Both printed output (via PostScript or PDF) and displayed output (via PDF) is of lower visual quality. Why? You've lost the intelligent scaling provided by the font's hinting information. Rendering of text from pure outlines is linear scaling which works great for higher magnifications, but works terribly for lower magnifications you get with combinations of serif type, smaller point sizes (such as 12pt and below), and lower resolutions such as you would have on-screen and for digital print devices (up to 1200dpi).

(2)     You cannot search PDF files in which text is outlined.

(3)     You cannot apply text touch-up or redaction on text which is outlined.

(4)     The resultant PDF file is usually quite bloated in size and can tell much longer to RIP.

(5)     If you are not careful, you will end up with effectively a non-editable InDesign document depending upon where and how you do this conversion to outlines.

The reason why this terrible practice persists is fear perpetuated by "old timers" who had to deal with dodgy, non-compliant RIPs in the past.

          - Dov

[rob day]

The reason for converting was to copy the layout into a document with another size without having to set up new formats and so on.

You should be able to accomplish that without outlining the text. When you copy & paste text, the styles from the source document get copied into the destination document. If there is a style with the same name in the destination document, the destination style's attributes get used. If you want the source document's style attributes to be used you can use Load All Text Styles to import the source styles before you start copying and pasting.

[maltep · Accepted solution]

@rob day

I want to avoid that because of the different size of the documents. I would have to adjust all formats. But I did not consider placing and scaling the hole document. Sometimes you just think too complicated. So my question is answered.