As a full-featured online publishing system, the chance you want to create publications using custom fonts is very likely.
The chance you need to use fonts, not standard on a Windows Server is even more likely.
Because FLO is a Windows Server-based publishing system, there are some things you might want to know...
3 very important things to remember:
FLO is Windows Based, so only use Windows T1, TTF or OTF fonts.
When you want to use a font, it should first be uploaded to the FLO server and Adobe InDesign Server needs to know about these new fonts
Some fonts, even when they are of the correct type, just won’t work!
1. Font Types
You will need to use OpenType, TrueType, or Windows Type1 fonts.
Adobe InDesign supports all these formats, even the Windows T1 fonts are recognized and usable by InDesign, when they are copied to the InDesign Font folder (~Applications/Adobe InDesign CS3/Fonts/).
If you don’t have a font in the correct format and there are no alternatives, you might want to buy a font-conversion utility like TransType Pro (http://www.fontlab.com) and convert the Mac font to OTF TTF or WinT1.
Next, delete the Mac fonts from your system, and reformat (if necessary) the InDesign document with the new fonts.
2. Font Location
In the FLO Suite you will be able to use all fonts installed on the server. These fonts include the fonts installed on the system-level (C:\Windows\Fonts) but also the FLO font-directory (after a standard install: D:\FLO_DATA\Fonts\). This FLO font-directory is placed as an alias in the Adobe InDesign Server font-directory, so FLO as well as InDesign Server will recognise these fonts.
When uploading a package from your local copy of Adobe InDesign, the used fonts will be placed in this directory. This happens for InDesign Templates as well as for complete InDesign files uploaded to artworkFLO.
If you want to keep control over these fonts manually, logon to the server using RDC or (if configured properly) FTP to add or delete the fonts to this directory manually.
3. Font Conflicts
When you need to use Windows TrueType fonts in your design on the Mac, be aware that even though some fonts have the same name (Arial, Verdana, Windings, etc.), the can differ from their Windows version installed on the server, so check the result very carefully.
Very occasionally we have a real font conflict, preventing fonts from being loaded at all. The only thing you can do, is cleanup the FLO Fontfolder manually, removing all fonts and add the fonts you need, one family at once.
When you add fonts manually, don’t forget to restart InDesign Server to refresh the list of fonts.
If a font still doesn’t showup in pdfFLO, or is not used in a template, the most likely reasons are that it is not a correct Windows font, the font is corrupted during upload, or there is a naming conflict between fonts in the Windows font directory and the FLO font directory.
In the last 3 years, we only had 2 occasions reported of fonts not showing up, while all conditions were met... The fist occasion was on our own development server, containing over 700 different fonts, which was caused by a corrupted manual upload of a font. The other problem had to do with WinDings, which for some reason ended up twice in the same Windows font directory.
So even when fonts can be a pain in the ***, you shouldn’t worry about them too much... When you need them, chances are quite good you will be able to use them.
That’s it for now... Happy New Year and FLO ahead!