One of the most common delays to printing jobs throughout the country is missing font. This is because although printing companies almost always have a huge collection of fonts in house, there are so many fonts, and variations of fonts that quite often they won’t have what you have used.

When you upload or send your files to us, always check that in addition to the document file and image files, you include font files for all the fonts used in your document. In later versions of programs like QuarkXpress and InDesign there is a “collect for output” feature that will gather all fonts for you. Flightcheck by Markzware is also inexpensive software that collects both your fonts and images. If you aren’t working in software that has this feature, here are some tips:

1. First find out all the fonts you are using in the document. Many desktop programs can save you time with a “Usage” feature that shows all the fonts being used in a document.
2. Then you need to find where that font is stored on your computer. On the Macintosh the fonts folder sits on your primary hard drive by default, although you may have additional font folders if you are using font management software like Adobe Type Manager.
3. Make sure you copy and send all parts of the necessary fonts (see “Postscript Fonts” below)

In most desktop publishing programs you have the option of choosing bold, italic, underline etc. for any given font. However we ask that rather than doing this you choose a version of that font that is bold or italic etc. The reason for this is that Menu Styles can often cause problems when your job gets sent to film.

To give an example of how you might do this, let’s say you are designing in QuarkXPress. The body of the text in the brochure is in Garamond, the subheads are in bold Garamond and you have a couple of captions that are italic and bold Garamond. Rather than simply clicking “B” or “I” in your Measurements palette, we recommend you choose the font Garamond Bold for your subheads and Garamond Bold Italic for your captions.

Stuff the folder containing all your fonts before you send it over the Internet, using WinZip or Stuffit. Fonts can easily get corrupted during transfer (especially important for Mac users). WinZip comes standard on the PC, simply right click on any folder or file you want to zip and look for the WinZip option. Stuffit unfortunately does not come standard on the Mac, and you will need to purchase it. However it will pay for itself quickly through preventing the host of problems that can arise from partial or full corruption of your files.

There are 2 major types of fonts, TrueType and Postscript fonts. Postscript fonts are the preferred choice for most printing companies. They have 2 parts to them, a printer font and a screen font. The screen fonts for any given font contain specific information of how to display that font at different pt sizes on a monitor. The printer font gives the printer the information it needs to print the font.

It is necessary to send both parts of any given postscript font to us when you send your files.

TrueType Fonts contain all the font information in one font file. At first this seems much simpler and trouble free than Postscript fonts, you only have to send one file to us for each font. However TrueType fonts have a reputation for causing numerous problems when it comes to printing. If you have the choice, use and send Postscript fonts for your print jobs.

If you are working on a design that contains placed graphics, check to see if those placed graphics contain text.

Graphics with text in them will often have font information. An example of this is placed graphics that have been created in Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand. Any text you use in these graphics applications has its own particular font information that will need to be sent to us along with your other fonts. A solution to this is to select any text in your Illustrator or Freehand document and Create Outlines or Convert to Paths respectively. This transforms the font information into paths, which means your printer will not be able to make any corrections to these graphics, but you also won’t need to send the fonts used.

Photoshop documents are another good example. If you use the Photoshop type tool then you are incorporating font information into that image and whatever document you place that image into. The solution is to flatten your Photoshop files before you place them into a desktop publishing program like QuarkXPress or InDesign. This converts any font information into pixels in the flattened image.