Use non-Roman fonts in Illustrator X

Sep 16, '03 10:04:00AM

Contributed by: vladimus

If you're a designer who works in the North American version of Illustrator 10, you'll find that (unlike other OS X programs) it can't read non-Roman fonts such as Chinese and Japanese. So, what you'll need to do is outline the fonts. This requires the installation of GhostScript, and you'll also need a PostScript printer.

To avoid the command line, I've written a collection of AppleScript frontends to some conversion utilities in GhostScript. These scripts will also help you get a copy of GhostScript, if needed. Here's the link on Versiontracker: PS2PDF and Friends.

After installation, open the file containing the non-Roman text. Select the text and change the font size to 36 points or larger. Then you'll need to save this into a PostScript file. To do this, go to the printer dialog box (Command-P), change the "Copies & Pages" menu to "Output Options," then change "Save as File" from PDF to PostScript. Click the "Save..." button.

Locate the .ps file you just saved, and drag and drop it into the PS2PS script found in the PS2PDF and Friends -> Optimization folder. A similarly-named .ps file should appear in the location of the original .ps file. Open this file in Illustrator, and the non-Roman text will be outlined!

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