Find Font for invisible spaces

[Phillip_Briggs@adobeforums.com]

We get supplied lots of files that contain spaces, in a font we don't have. This would cause the file to fail at the rip stage.

So in Illustrator 10, we used find font, to locate the spaces and change them to a font we do have, or just locate them so we can delete them.

Now in CS, find font doesn't find the spaces, so we have to use preview mode and zoom in to find them manually.

Does anyone know why Find Font doesn't find spaces anymore?

[Gary_Newman@adobeforums.com]

Find Font finds fonts, not text. You can use it to find the instances of the bad font and replace it with a different font. To find spaces, which are just text characters, you need to use Find/Replace (on the Edit menu), where you can change the spaces for another character (but not change the font).

[Phillip_Briggs@adobeforums.com]

Yes, we could use find/replace... but Find Font used to work really well (in 10) because it gave a list of fonts that were missing (which we knew were the spaces) and when all of them were deleted the missing font dissappeared rom the Find Font panel.

We tried doing a select all and convert to paths but it misses the spaces!

Find / replace will find spaces - ALL the spaces. it's just the ones in these missing fonts that are causing problems.

It used to work in 10, why not CS?

[Phillip_Briggs@adobeforums.com]

Just had another look, and these spaces aren't actual spaces after all. It's where the designer has clicked on the artwork with the text tool, but not typed anything.

Nevertheless, Illustrator CS complains that the font is missing even though no text has been typed.

These 'non spaces' show up in preview mode as a little x.

Any ideas how to remove them all quickly?

[Doug_Katz@adobeforums.com]

Object>Path>Clean up

[Phillip_Briggs@adobeforums.com]

Thanks!