Expert: Amy - 1/9/2008

Question
I've been asked to work on a project which was created in Illustrator CS2 on a
PC, but I'm working on Illustrator CS2 on the Mac. I can open the PC
document but I get a warning sign that the fonts aren't available on my
computer. The warning only asks me if I want to continue opening the
document and doesn't give me the option of substituting fonts. I do have a
version of at least one of the fonts, but that doesn't look right when I try and
substitute once the document is open (it looks about twice the size it should)
Is it possible to work on these documents across platform? How do you deal
with the font issue? Buy fonts that have PC and Mac versions or outline all
fonts before sending to the other platform (which is impractical because then
text can't be edited)? Anything besides the fonts which will be a problem?
Thanks for your help.

Answer
Hi Kathleen.

Yes, people who have to edit docs on two platforms either buy two sets or acquire the original fonts and use a font conversion package.

Of course, I've heard that the software that costs money works better but here's a link to FontForge, which is free!
http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/

How do I deal with it personally?  Oh, it's painful. Sometimes people don't embed the fonts. Sometimes I need to edit the text and the embedded subset doesn't work. Usually, I hunt the internet for a look-alike. Most of my customers don't really care if there are minor differences. But with large amounts of body copy, you then have to check for hyphenation and line break issues.

I can't think of any other cross-platform issues, unless they also forgot to give you linked files. Well, sometimes customers are surprised by the colors they have chosen. Windows monitors are a bit darker than Mac monitors, to put it simply. Customers think their artwork is washed out when they see it on the Mac sometimes. But they shouldn't really be choosing colors via screen, anyway. Paper color guides are best.

Good luck!
Amy