This article discusses the use of Adobe Fonts for workflows that utilize automation processes with Enfocus Switch and/or Adobe InDesign Server.

BACKGROUND

Adobe Fonts is a font library that is available to all users of Adobe InDesign and Adobe InDesign Server. Adobe Fonts are activated online, and do not need to be installed directly on your system. When you activate Adobe Fonts on your system, they will appear in the font menu and may be accessed just like a standard, installed font.

When a document that utilizes Adobe Fonts is opened, InDesign will typically prompt to activate the required Adobe Fonts if they have not been previously activated on your system. There is also an Adobe InDesign preference setting that allows you to auto-activate fonts at the time a document is opened (available at the bottom of the File Handling section of the Adobe InDesign preferences).

AUTOMATED WORKFLOW ISSUES

When working with Adobe InDesign documents in an automated environment using Enfocus Switch and/or Adobe InDesign Server, you may run into issues with Adobe Fonts. The main issue is that because Adobe InDesign provides no software interface to control, monitor or detect the activation of Adobe Fonts, the only way to process documents using Adobe Fonts is to open the documents on the workstation and allow Adobe InDesign to activate the fonts in the normal fashion. 

Once a document has been opened for processing, if the document utilizes Adobe Fonts that have not already been activated, the document will be processed as if those fonts are missing. For DesignMerge customers using Enfocus Switch and/or InDesign Server, the missing font condition will be caught by the Preflight or Merge routines and treated as an error or warning condition.

POTENTIAL WORKAROUNDS

The use of Adobe Fonts in automated environments such as InDesign Server is not supported by Adobe. However, we have found that for documents that fail due to missing Adobe Fonts, typically routing and processing the document a second time will succeed because the font activation is triggered automatically during the first attempt to open and process the job (assuming the Adobe Font auto activation preference has been enabled).

Once an Adobe Font has been activated, it remains active on the given workstation/account that was used to activate it, even across restarts of the software or the system. So over time, the missing Adobe Fonts issue should become less problematic as the library of active Adobe Fonts on the system continues to grow.

Of course you can always login to the Adobe account being used on the Switch or InDesign Server workstation and manually activate any of the available Adobe Font library. This would ensure that such fonts are available for all documents processed by the system.

NOTE: Please check with Adobe for specific requirements regarding font licensing and the use of Adobe Fonts in automated processing systems.