Through trial and error, I discovered that deleting a text frame color block made the missing Times font disappear.

Through more trial and error, and mugs of tea, I discovered that if I deleted all the blank but color- filled text blanks in these newsletter files the Times font error would disappear. It would reappear immediately if I drew a blank text frame.

Under Windows>Styles>Object Styles>Text Frames, I found that the Text Frames were set up to pull something called “Basic Paragraph Style.”

Under Windows>Styles>Paragraph Styles, I right-clicked on Basic Paragraphs, and chose Edit from the pull-down. I changed two areas on the basic paragraph style:

1. Under General, I changed “Based On” and “Next Style” both to No Paragraph Style.

2. Under Basic Character Formats, I changed Font Family from “Times” to Adobe Jenson Pro (which is the font we use for body text at my company).

Now when I draw a text frame in these newsletters, it doesn’t create the Times font error. Both steps were needed to effect this change. I also had to make the same changes to the paragraph styles in each of the newsletter files, of course.

I feel rather good about solving this problem myself. Our IT dept doesn’t really support my Adobe Creative Suite products and so I’m on my own when a weirdness happens. I appreciate forums like this InDesignSecrets.com., and one part of it inspired me to go looking at various default settings. Thank you.

I had been dogged since CS2 by an errant version of Times on my most-used template. I thought it was a “feature” of InDesign that I was stuck with. When I upgraded to CS5, I was dismayed to see it still, which gave me the motivation to try to track it down again.

With instructions from your column, I was able to find a master page that had the bizarre Times version applied to a couple of text boxes (but not the text contained within). I deleted the boxes, tested every which way, and its Gone. Gone!

Thank you!

If clicking Find First in the find font dialog box doesn’t bring you anywhere, then there might be some other weirdness in the document and you might have to do an export to INX to clear it out.

Actually, NOT WRONG. Apply [None] by clicking on it in the Character Styles palette, not the Control Bar or the Character palette.

Font Family and Font Style are options in the Control Bar and in the Character palette. Those are completely different than the Character Styles palette, where [None] does appear. The effect of selecting [None] is that any applied Character Styles are cleared, returning the text to the basic Paragraph Style.

“It really doesn’t matter if you use styles or not, you will experience this missing font beauty anyway because ID applies a BASIC PARAGRAPH style that it imposes upon all type before you get a chance to apply your own style to it. This is why you will get those weird fonts.”

This is true as well. Both issues can cause phantom missing fonts. I always warn folks that when selecting text to paste into InDesign to be extremely careful (intentional) about paragraph returns. We sometimes have text pasted from Word onto InDesign’s pasteboard, styled, then cut and pasted somewhere onto the page. The user doesn’t realize that when they styled the text, they omitted a trailing paragraph return. But when they pasted the text into their page, they included that return. When they realize they have the extra paragraph return and try to delete it, they actually delete the properly styled return, leaving the improperly styled one in the paragraph.