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.

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!