With the Create and Publish* templating module, you can empower all stakeholders to participate in the content generation process, while ensuring brand adherence and consistency across the entire organization. Read further to understand the nuances of font usage when creating your templates.
Adobe-Licensed Fonts
For the best outcomes, we recommend purchasing your brand fonts to use in your templates and installing them locally. Licensed fonts are not respected in created publications, per Adobe's Font Licensing guidelines:
"The font licensing isn't compatible with InDesign Server. You will need to purchase the appropriate font license for any fonts that you want to use in InDesign Server from the font foundry directly or the foundry's authorized reseller."
"The Terms of Use do not permit the fonts to be transferred to another user or computer, so they cannot be packaged with the file."
If you own a font or are using an open font that is recognized by Adobe as part of their library you may still run into the above issue. Our advice is to disable Adobe Fonts, verify that the fonts are installed locally, and add the fonts in your paragraph styles.
Appropriate Font Formats
Lytho DAM utilizes a Windows-based server. In order to utilize your fonts on this server, you'll need to ensure that your fonts are Windows compatible formats like OpenType or TrueType. Any Mac-specific fonts will not be included in the package that InDesign sends to the DAM, resulting in your browser's default font being selected.
Paragraph Style Overrides
InDesign Character and Paragraph Styles are a collection of rules that define the way your text behaves and looks. They contain formatting for both the characters (fonts, color, scale, etc.) and for the paragraph (indentation, alignment, hyphenation rules, etc.). They are especially useful when sharing documents among team members to ensure consistent formatting or when managing large documents with a variety of text styles.
By default, InDesign establishes a “Basic Paragraph” style on all paragraphs in a document. Paragraph Style Overrides occur when users make changes to the text formatting that are not formalized in a set style (by either creating a new paragraph style or by resetting to the original paragraph style rules). Common examples are changes to the font, font size, typographical emphasis (bold, italics, underline), kerning, alignment, and paragraph spacing. InDesign flags these overrides by placing a plus symbol to the right of the style name in the style panel.
To maintain your paragraph and character formatting, you will want to:
- Create Paragraph Styles for your editable text, because the Paragraph and Character Styles in your InDesign document are packaged for reference later.
- Run Preflight to catch any errors when packaging your InDesign input file for the DAM. This will catch any style overrides in your document.
If the template you've created in Create and Publish include style overrides in the input file, you will initially see the fonts in their given format on the asset. But when you update your publication, Create and Publish will lose any text formatting that isn’t in a set Paragraph Style if there are style overrides on that text. This can lead to unexpected outputs for the user.
We recommend defining Paragraph Styles for editable text and removing Style Overrides in your Create and Publish Templates.
*Available only to customers with Create and Publish