Author: Brodie Greig

A Possible Solution for Getting Fonts Working In Adobe Illustrator

You will find a few examples from people out there having trouble with fonts that just aren’t being recognised/rendered properly in Adobe Illustrator (I’m running CS5). The thing is, the font shows up in Illustrator and appears to be there for you to select it for use. However when you do select it, you either encounter square boxes with a big ‘X’ inside of them, or the font you’re attempting to select flickers and your text reverts back to a standard font such as Myriad.

I had this problem with a font in another language: “Mangal” or “Hindi”. After a bit of looking around and some experimentation, I found a way around it that has worked for me. Basically, I run the font through an online font conversion tool such as this one, convert it to it’s original format (for me that was .TFF) and then install that font the same way you would any other font in Windows. Voilà. I can now select the font just fine in Illustrator, paste in the text information I wanted to display and everything works pretty well.

Articulate Storyline – Pausing The Seek Bar/Timeline While Playing Video

This may be apparent to some of you but I thought I’d post it anyway to save someone out there a bit of time in the future. I worked out how to pause the timeline while playing different media (video). This need arose when I needed the ability to attach and play narration on the base layer (and this is important so that the user can scroll through the audio at will using the timeline) while also having a video option on the slide too (the user can trigger the play of this video on will also). The problem was that I wasn’t able to pause the audio AND the timeline specifically when I chose to play the video. The timeline just kept on running even though the audio was paused and this messed up my ability to seek and caused the audio to cut out short.

So, solution. For video, now I just put it on another slide, put reference/trigger the video on the slide that I want the video on (like a big play button) and then I just use the lightbox function to play it, with the video controls on that slide. This pauses the timeline and everything appears to the user working well.

Easy =)

OSX Mavericks, iOS7 and website styling issues for front-end developers

Recently, I was working on a website on my Mac (OSX Lion 10.7). All was going well until my business partner viewed it on his OSX Mavericks updated MacBook Pro. Chrome, Safari, they both displayed the same incongruence! The menu was all out of sorts, line heights and padding were messed up. So I proceeded to view this on my iPhone 4s which has the latest IOS7 on it. Same thing! Bizarre!

Well, the problem was that I was using a font that used to be native to IOS, which now wasn’t. Myriad Pro/Myriad was the offending font type. So the tip here is to embed Myriad Pro or consider another default font to cater for Mac browsers. Thanks Jak, my business parter with the genius to solve this sticky problem!