Illustrator

Font Outlining

One of the biggest problems in printing is the issue of fonts. Fonts come in many different formats for different operating systems. Some font families have similiar names, but different appearances.
If you include the font and all needed resources (the bitmap portion and the laser component), and the font is built for Macintosh, we should have no problem printing your job. However, Fonts are not that hard to create, and their are a lot of amatuer fontographers releasing font for download on the internet. Sometimes these fonts are not created correctly, and will not print to high-end equipment. Other fonts conflict with other fonts in our systems, and some font just don�t work at all.
The best way to make sure your print job can be printed is to use standard fonts from well-known foundries such as Adobe, Bitstream, AGFA, and others.
Another way to make sure your text will print correctly is to outline your fonts. this process basically takes the shape information in a font and converts your editable text into shapes that look like letters. By doing this, no font files are needed, because the �letters� in your text are now just shapes in illustrator. The trade-off in outlining fonts is that your text can not be edited after the text has been outlined. Try saving two versions of your file, one original with the text as text, and the file you submit that has the fonts outlined. Another concern is the outlined shapes describing the text are much more complex than the font, and the size of your file may ballon to many megabytes!
If you have a lot of body text, and it is in a industry standard font face, leave it as text, but include your font file. Headlines and large text should probably be outlined to shapes, so what you see is really what you get.

Well, I haven't quite finished this section, so, if you
have a specific question about a feature or tool in Illustrator,
or vector art in general,
please feel free to email me at

[email protected].

back to Main Help page