Missing font, but its not?

What happens if you change the pink text to a different Chinese font?
Could there be character style overrides on the pink sections which are font weights that aren’t available in the Chinese font?

(your screenshot isn’t working for me “404 not found”)

Good luck,
Chris.

I also cannot see the screen shot. Strange.

Remember that pink highlighting (“the dreaded pinkness”) means 2 things: either the font doesn’t exist OR the characters that are being called for don’t exist in that particular font.

The best clue is the font or font style fields in the Control panel. If the font or font style has brackets around it, it means the font doesn’t exist. If no brackets, then the font exists, but the character doesn’t (in that font).

Thanks for the screenshot.
Now there are three things that I can’t explain:
1. it worked for the translation agency but not for you.
2. as well as the pink characters, there are some “empty spaces” without pink highlighting, for example just before the closing bracket in the third bullet point.
3. there are “English” characters in pink, but still legible, for example 52 in the first bullet point, IPO in the second bullet point and BDO on the first line underneath the third bullet point.

Two wild guesses:

A)
Could there be a font conflict between the one that they supplied and another font that you already have? Is it possible to disable all other Chinese fonts, and just leave DFHei Std in the “Document fonts” folder for the job?

B)
Other people having similar problems at
https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2312935
with a mix-up between Simplified and Traditional Chinese (SC and TC), but I’m not really sure if that’s the issue here.
According to Linotype, DFHei appears to be available in both SC and TC variants, but the vast majority of google hits for DFHei Std appear to be TC.
Do you know which Chinese this translation uses? Normally it would be SC for mainland China, TC for Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Could it be that the agency slipped up with SC/TC versions of the font? i.e. they had the right font installed when they made the PDF, but mistakenly sent you the TC font instead of the SC font (or vice versa)?

Puzzled, and interested,
Chris

thanks for your previous two *.indd screencaps.
what is your os-vers/indd-vers/acrobat-vers/pitstop*-vers?

os:
in document-folder … compare date/time of *.indd file with pdf file … maybe the *.indd file they sent is not specific to the *.pdf they sent.
did you install the fonts … or using font-manager? if font-manager, check to make sure each sub-family is activated. in supplied font-folder … are any of the fonts showing as “zero” bytes or corrupt(icon)?

acrobat:
the supplied *.pdf … open it and go directly to “menu/file/properties” … click the “fonts” tab … all fonts used in document should be listed … including sub-sets and sub-families. compare the fonts packaged with the fonts in the properties list.

open the supplied *.pdf file … with acrobat’s text-tool, highlight a chinese character that is displaying correctly … now click the text while holding down CTRL key … choose “edit” text … interface appears … showing which font was used. do same for the character which is not displaying correctly in *.indd file. compare.

pitstop:
pitstop is very specific to font-names … appearing in the font-tab of the inspector. click a chinese character that is displaying correctly … open up inspector to the fonts-tab … take screencap. now, click a chinese character that is not displaying correctly … open up inspector to the fonts-tab … take screencap. compare.

open *.indd file with NO fonts loaded … take screencap of the fonts missing in find-font interface.
open *.indd file with ALL supplied fonts loaded … take screencap of the fonts missing in find-font interface.
compare.
export to *.pdf the *.indd file with ALL fonts loaded (yes, even pink-eyes) … compare with *.pdf file customer supplied.

indesign:
open *.indd file and place/drag cursor to highlight one pink-eye character … analyze compare with a visible font that displays correctly … analyzer/compare with “space” character. look at all different interfaces … main, character, character-styles, open-type sub-formats, etc.

*pitstop is a plugin by enfocus.

When InDesign creates a package it inserts a file named Instructions.txt listing the fonts and artwork included. Back in IDCS4 days ID didn’t try to include CJK fonts, but for some recent jobs IDCS6 did package some Adobe CJK fonts; oddly, Instructions.txt specifically said they were not in the package even though they were. Accurate or not, at least ID reported on all the fonts needed. So I’d start there.

Chinese fonts vary dramatically in the number of characters they include, nowadays ranging from ca. 20,000 to several times that. This renders “SC” and “TC” pretty meaningless, and “dreaded pink boxes” are simply a fact of life when changing Chinese fonts or for text with any sort of complication.

There is a very handy InDesign script for identifying the missing chars., as discussed at https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1037284 — see the link to Peter Kahrel’s improvement near the end. Once you know the missing chars.’ code-points you can use Windows CharMap to confirm whether a particular font includes them. Or you can download Andrew West’s splendid BabelMap, where the Fonts/Font Coverage tool can list any installed fonts containing a specific code point or all the chars. in a pasted-in text snippet.

A major reason for “dreaded pink boxes” has been that Chinese fonts generally offer few alternate weights, and those only in small character sets. Two open-source projects now address this, with 64K chars in seven weights. Google makes them available as Noto CJK, though I use the Adobe versions named SourceHanSans and SourceHanSerif. I still prefer Adobe Ming and Adobe Song (in that order, depending on the chars. I need), but I’ve used SourceHanSerif for heavier weights or special circumstances.

Good luck,
David

David Goodrich wrote “…This renders “SC” and “TC” pretty meaningless…”
A good point about the variation in the number of characters included in Chinese fonts, but surely using a font designed for SC when the text is TC is just asking for trouble?

The actual number of simplified characters is relatively small, on the order of a couple thousand (more are being added up in the 2nd plane but very few CJK fonts go beyond CJK Extension B). In other words, fraction of character counts. Also, Unicode swallowed up both simp. and trad. long ago, so that ? and ?, for example have separate codepoints, and only a very few fonts connect the two as variants of essentially the same char. (Needless to say, this means proof-reading requires a whole new degree of concentration.)

For the chars. just mentioned, BabelMap reports that I have 23 fonts containing ?, including Source Han Serif TC, and all of them also contain the trad. version, ?.

David

convert the ttf font to otf and replace it.. it will work..

I’ve got a similar problem. But not with Chinese – it’s a bullet within a font. The font is Myriad Pro, and the bullet is referring to Unicode 25CF. I know that because when I hover over the blank bullet cell in the Paragraph Style Options, it tells me the reference code. When I go to PopChar on my Mac, I can find the symbol when I ask to see all unicode characters, but not when I select “characters of current font”. It’s in the geometric shapes. But I can’t make ID use it. It doesn’t appear to be in the short list of charcters under the Add Bullet popup (at least in a quick scan, anyway).
I’m using a template obtained from ID Secrets – the IDS Template Manual created – it appears – in 2017. The Myriad Font I installed was the one came as the Resources>Required>Fonts for ID 2020.
Any thoughts? I’m trying to go with design thoughts of people better than myself, hence the template.

I wonder if it’s a font version issue, similar to this one:

What is That Weird “A” Bullet Character in the Dialog Box?

Thanks David. I think that’s it. I have a capital A in the slot before it so will probably lose that too now that I know. Pity that ID just doesn’t let us pick more of those tucked-away characters ourselves.