An illustrated guide to outlining text in Adobe InDesign CS3.

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Why text and fonts can be a problem.

Fonts are easy to use when you are working on your own PC or Apple-Mac. However, many problems often occur when your file is sent to your commercial printing company.

Put quite simply:

  • The fonts you use might not be transferred to your commercial printer when you send the file; or
  • If the fonts are sent, your commercial printing company might not be licenced to use those fonts; or
  • Even if your commercial printing company is licenced to use the fonts, that company might not have all the various sub-groups of those fonts (e.g.: the company might have the bold version of your font, but might not have the italic version of your font).

So, the best and easiest way to resolve the font issue to outline all the text on your file — and this page shows you how to outline text and fonts when using Adobe InDesign.

 

A visual guide on how to outline fonts and text in Adobe InDesign CS3 files.

Outlining fonts is very easy in Adobe InDesign, and the following screen shots show you how to do the font-outlining in just a few easy steps.

First, you must highlight the text that you want outlined. The highlighting can be acheived in one of two ways:

  1. Place your mouse over the text that you want outlined, and double click your mouse. This has been done in the below screenshot, where the name of the company has beed highlighted (see the small white boxes in each corner). Alternately,
  2. Choose Edit from the menu at the top, then choose Select All from the drop-down menu (the short-cut keys are "Windows+"A" on a PC, or "Apple" + "A" on an Apple-Mac), and then you will notice that all of the various images and text boxes have been highlighted.

 

The second step in outlining text and fonts in Adobe InDesign is to choose Type from the top menu, and then choose Create Outlines in the drop-down menu that appears. This can be seen in the below screen shot.

 

The text should then become somewhat blushed or pixilated around the edges with some blue dots. You can see the below image, where the name of the company has yellow text, but is traced with the pixillated blue line.

 

If you chose to outline all text and fonts in one go (i.e.: you selected all the text and images in one go), then the job is now completed. However, please note that this process must be done for each page of your file (i.e.: do the same on page 2 as you did on page 1). Once ALL pages are done, then just save your file.

If you chose to outline the font and text boxes individually, then you must continue with the next text box. in the below screen shot, you can see that the person's name and title box has been highlighted (by double clicking on the relevant text box), and that specific text box must now be outlined (i.e.: choose Type from the top menu, and then choose Create Outlines from the drop-down menu).

 

Once all text and font boxes have been outlined in your Adobe InDesign file, you then save your file — but save the file with a new name (e.g.: "Printing-Online Bus card Outlined"). This means you can use the OLD file to change the text at some later stage.

 

You can now send your Adobe InDesign file to your commercial printing company, and you will not need to worry about the fonts.