Find and Replace for fonts in Designer.

[Kurt Lang]

It took me all morning to figure out that Designer, 2.5.5, has no such feature. It tells you if fonts are missing, but that's all. And no, I should not have to purchase Publisher to pass vector art over to it just to find and replace fonts, then pass it back to Designer.

I had to update a large document that used an old version of Times Roman, which I no longer had and knew Designer would complain was missing. Yes, I could sit there and update hundreds of text boxes one at a time, but that would be ridiculous and take all day. If not more.

I still have Photoshop, but used to have the entire suite (since actual version 4, before CS4). But once our in-home business was closed down to retire, I replaced everything but PS with free, or one-time cost alternatives. After trying many vector apps, I settled on Affinity Designer as the only such app that came at least reasonably close to Illustrator.

After discovering there is no such option in Designer, I ended up downloading the trial version of Illustrator. As seen in the images below, I chose Find/Replace Font, then made the changes in the palette from Times Roman to Times New Roman and clicked Change All (ignore the obvious part of the image that says Copperplate).

All totaled, the time to acquire the trial version of Illustrator, download and install it, and then open the document and make the global change was a grand total of 15 minutes. If you consider only the time in Illustrator, one minute.

There absolutely no good reason why this function shouldn't already be part of Designer. Seriously, people use text in artwork all the time.

Edited November 7, 2024 by Kurt Lang

[HCl]

.

[Kurt Lang]

Quote

If you created a text style for the text it would be easy to update the text style in the text style panel.

You'd still have to update one text box at a time.

Quote

Or use menu>select>select object and select Text frame and exclude the frames you don't want to have altered and change the font for all the selected frames.

There it is! Same idea, or at least the same outcome. I did look through all of the menu items, and that one just didn't sound like what I was looking for, so I didn't try it.

Quote

Or search a copy of that Times Roman(buy it) and install that so it wouldn't show up as missing anymore.

Having run an in-home prepress business for over 25 years, I have over 10,000 legally owned fonts. And that's after deleting thousands of the now obsolete Type 1 PostScript variety, of which Times Roman was one of them. And I certainly am not going to go out and purchase another version of Times when I already have a dozen other OpenType variations.

Quote

Or buy publisher or even better yet, the universal license and make use of the studiolink to switch to 1 of the 3 personas on 3 os's.

That's spending money on a product I will otherwise never use. For page layout, I can continue to use my copy of Quark XPress 2018 on an older Mac. I tested Publisher, but it cannot export any file format professional press shops want. Neither Quark nor InDesign. Having worked in, and with such shops for over 45 years, I can tell you straight out they hate oddball, proprietary files that force you to purchase software for practically only one client. Like the person who sent a beautiful and very detailed cutaway view of a ship. But it was in Corel Draw, which virtually no one uses in comparison to Illustrator and (at the time) Freehand. They had to purchase a $3,000 PC and an $800 copy of Corel Draw just so they could open the file and save it as an EPS to get the image into production. And then that expensive, one-off purchase just sat in a corner unused for years.

So, as stated above, I will not, and should not have to purchase another app to do what Designer should already have the ability do to itself. But, all of this is irrelevant now as your second suggestion is essentially the same function.

Thank you for taking the time to guide me. Having used Illustrator for decades, I still stumble to find equivalent functions in Designer. Each time I've looked, they are in there, but not where I try to look per Illustrator's layout. Such as, the last place I'd expect to find move and duplicate is by simply pressing the enter key. That's a menu item in Illustrator.

The main catch with this issue (and is why I ended up here), is I did multiple searches for how to change multiple text boxes in Designer, and the returned results were almost all for Publisher. Nothing I could find mentioned anything about Select > Select Object > Frame Text.

[fde101]

9 minutes ago, Kurt Lang said:

I tested Publisher, but it cannot export any file format professional press shops want.

PDF?

[Kurt Lang]

Yes, there's that. But what they usually want is editable files in the original format. Or, used to.

That probably shows how long I've been out of the full production end loop. I used to do all of that stuff in a full print shop. In our business, it was almost all imaging work in Photoshop. Only occasionally did I need to work in Illustrator. And as far as InDesign and Quark went, about the only thing I used them for was to open client files for reference, or to output a PDF to use as an FPO to build a layered image in PS.

And ya' know? That is a very good idea. Maybe I will buy a copy of Publisher so I have something that isn't so close to being outdated beyond useful (QXP 2018). Because I certainly won't ever again pay for the CC suite. I hang onto Photoshop because a) I know it too well, b) I have filters I use all the time that won't run in Affinity Photo, and c) I only pay $10 a month for it. It's $20 now as the cheapest option, so I'll never let my older subscription lapse.

[walt.farrell]

6 hours ago, Kurt Lang said:

You'd still have to update one text box at a time.

Do you really have a different Text Style for each text frame? If not, by using the same Text Style for each, you will only need to make a change once.

 

[Kurt Lang]

No. It was just a busy document that had one font used for the entire thing. Using Select > Select Object > Frame Text to change all of them at once to a different font was all I needed.

While that was great for the document I was updating, it still leaves an unresolved issue.

Example: I created a simple text box with three different fonts. Copied the box. Created a paragraph style based on selecting one of the boxes. Since it will only pay attention to the first font it finds, the style changes everything in the duplicate box to Times New Roman.

This is where a tool such as Adobe's shown above would be a tremendous help. I could selectively choose to replace (example) Arial with Zapfino throughout the entire document in one move, without the need to even select anything first.

If something similar already exists in Designer, I can't find it.

Edited November 8, 2024 by Kurt Lang

[HCl]

.

 

[Kurt Lang]

Okay, but you don't need a paragraph or character style for that. Select > Select Object > Frame Text and then selecting another font does the same thing. Either way, you're still changing all of the text to one font. Per my image above, I can't change just the Arial text at the bottom to another font as I can in Illustrator by specifically telling it to change one font to another.

[HCl]

.

[Kurt Lang]

Nicely done, but much more work than just having Designer look for one font by name and replacing it with another.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not griping. Just trying to figure out to do many of same things I used to do in Illustrator. Most are there (just hard to find sometimes). That this is only version 2 software and is already this feature rich is quite simply amazing.

Edited November 8, 2024 by Kurt Lang