How do I find the name of a missing font?

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Level 1

0 points

How do I find the name of a missing font?

Hi,

Messing with fonts yesterday, I turned off a lot fonts to save ressources and to remove asian fonts that I never use.

Unfortunately I have turned off some of the fonts I used in titles and even more unfortunate FCP X does not warn me about the missing fonts (not even when exporting - just uses Helvetica).

I can't find any hint on what the missing fonts names is. Nothing! No warning, no help ...

I'm thinking this can't be true ...!? There must be some way to get the names of the missing fonts.

Can you help me?

iMac (24-inch Mid 2007), OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)

Posted on Sep 11, 2015 12:17 AM

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Answer 1

Russ H

Level 7

22,432 points

Sep 11, 2015 5:26 AM in response to ZenseArt

Have you looked in Font Book to see whether they are enabled or removed? Or in the Fons folder in the local library?

Russ

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Answer 2

ZenseArt Author

Level 1

0 points

Sep 11, 2015 6:29 AM in response to Russ H

Hi Russ,

Yes, that's what I'm doing right now. But I don't know what font to turn on again. I have 1532 fonts (I'm a graphic designer) to choose between and FCP X does not update fonts on the spot. I have to restart FCP every time I activate a font. 6 hours later I still haven't found the missing fonts.

Do you know where in FCP X I can see which font is missing?

I can't find anything in the menus. The documentation and the build in Help does not provide any help on the subject, and numerous Google searches also came up short of an solution. It looks like it's always been a problem with FCP regardless of the version number.

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Answer 3

Tom Wolsky

Level 10

152,809 points

Sep 11, 2015 6:39 AM in response to ZenseArt

TThe application doesn't keep track of the fonts you've used in the past.

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Answer 4

ZenseArt Author

Level 1

0 points

Sep 11, 2015 6:57 AM in response to Tom Wolsky

Well, that's just great (not)!

Stupid of me to think a pro app would have this simple feature, just because most other apps from Apple does this 😮.

But thanks Tom for answering 🙂

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Answer 5

Sep 11, 2015 8:13 AM in response to ZenseArt

This is of little consequence. There is a function in FontBook to create families or collections. We made a set of video-compatible typefaces ages ago and just keep adding to or deleting from it as time goes by.

This family has only 10-15 faces, chosen particularly for their screen readability, not for uniqueness or particular flair. This collection also includes reduced numbers of variations and versions of our brand-specific faces (for instance, the graphics designers use all variations of these but only three or four are suitable for video so we switched off others). We go to this video-friendly family first for every project.

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Answer 6

fox_m

Level 6

13,282 points

Sep 11, 2015 12:44 PM in response to ZenseArt

Only approach I can think of is turn on *all* your fonts in Font Book, or restore all the fonts you have used for projects (if you can remember - not likely you need to restore the asian fonts.) Then in FCPX, go to File > Open Library > From Backup and select a version old enough to recover the font names (you'll have to do this manually—write them down). You should be able to Open Library from Backup from a more recent version to get back to where you are now. (Note: I have never done this myself... so approach with caution to protect the current states of your projects.)

HTH

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