DESIGER

How to check for missing fonts

Ive been commissioned to write a script that helps with the back-end of a workflow, exporting/printing completed documents. Or, to be a little pedantic about it, allegedly completed documents. But what if a document has missing fonts or links? Or if links need updating?

Of these three possibilities, only the third can be dealt with automatically. And finding that links are missing is easy (just check the status property of each link). That will allow the script to check for either links that need relinking or updating, taking appropriate action for each. But what about missing fonts?

Well, the first thing I realized was that if fonts are missing, all I need to do is report that to the user and advise them to use the menu item Find Font... on the Type menu to fix it. So, I need a quick way to find out if any font needed by the document is missing. I ran a timing loop against each of the properties of a font, like this:

//DESCRIPTION: Checking for missing document fonts

var myStartTime = new Date();
aDoc = app.activeDocument;
for (var j = 0; 100 > j; j++) {
  try {
    aFonts = aDoc.fonts.everyItem().status;
  } catch (e) {
  beep();
  }
}
var myEndTime = new Date();
var myDuration = (myEndTime - myStartTime);
prompt("", "status " + myDuration)

This was the last test I ran, so it shows the alphabetically last propery, status. The results are shown below (the numbers show how many milliseconds it took to attempt to get the properties of a document that had two missing fonts). Notice that some of the properties are available even for missing fonts. If I wanted to warn the user about specific missing fonts, Id have to use the status property, and then cycle through the results.

718  allowEditableEmbedding
922  allowOutlines
856  allowPDFEmbedding
894  allowPrinting
357  fontFamily (doesnt give error)
754  fontType
915  index (doesnt give error)
857  location
460  name (doesnt give error)
371  parent (doesnt give error)
930  postscriptName
4885  properties (doesnt give error)
911  restrictedPrinting
911  status (doesnt give error)

But if all I want to know is whether or not any fonts are missing, I can simply do this:

try {
  fontLocs = app.activeDocument.fonts.everyItem().location;
} catch (e) {
  errorExit("Active document has missing fonts; please correct using Type/Find Font and try again.");
}

Why do I choose the location property? Because thats the first one I thought of user and the timing test says that the results are just about all the same (the minor differences could easily be the result of blips while I was running the script; indeed, Im showing the lowest result of three or four runs for most of the properties).

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