Fixing broken links and missing fonts in a document

There may be times where we're working with InDesign files that someone else has created on their computer, and opening the file on a different computer may show a number of errors related to missing links and fonts. For example, the file extras.indd contains some elements we want to include in the newsletter we are working on, but the document uses a font we don't have access to on our computer. Additionally, since the images used are in a different location than where InDesign is expecting them to be, we need to tell InDesign where to find those images.

Let's learn how to resolve those issues. We'll start by opening the file, then seeing what issues appear.

With the file open, we can see two visible indicators of the issues we need to resolve. First, many of the images in the document are displayed in low quality or as a gray rectangle, and have a red icon with a white question mark or a yellow caution symbol displayed in the upper left corner of the image's frame, as shown in the following images:

On the third page of the document, we also see some text highlighted in pink to indicate that the original font isn't available on our computer, such as the headline for the article on that page:

Let's start by fixing the broken links. Afterwards, we'll replace the missing font with Verdana so it matches the rest of the newsletter.

Fixing missing links

In order to fix the missing linked items, we'll use the Links panel. We can open this panel from the Window menu on the Menu bar, if it's not already present on your screen.

The Links panel appears:

The top part of the Links panel displays a list of all linked items in the document and where they're located. When a linked item is selected in the top part of the panel, the bottom part displays information about the item, such as the file type, file size, and where it's located on your computer.

In the list, we also see the same question mark indicator next to four of the linked items in the document. These files are all located inside of the Images folder in the InDesign Basics folder, so let's go ahead and fix those links now. We'll start off by relinking the file placeholder.png.

At this point, the images should be displaying properly, and the question mark indicator is no longer present at the upper left corner of each image's frame.

Fixing missing font errors

Now, let's focus on the missing font errors. We can replace the missing fonts using the Find/Replace Font dialog box. Let's open the dialog box, then take a look at its contents before replacing the missing font with one that's installed on our computer. The Find/Replace Font dialog box is accessible through the Type menu.

The Find/Replace Font dialog box appears:

Here, we can see a list of the fonts used in the document, what fonts are missing, if any, and replace a font in this list with another font that we have installed on our computer. If we look at the top of the list, we can see the missing font, Lobster 1.4 Regular, at the top of the list.

Replacing a font in this list, whether it's a missing font or not, with another font installed on our computer will reformat any text that uses the font we replaced with the newly chosen font. Let's replace all instances of Lobster 1.4 Regular with Verdana Bold, since that's already in use in the document.

NOTE: If you have the font Lobster 1.4 installed on your computer, you won't see the missing font error — if this is the case, save the file and move to the next page in the course, Working with the Content Collector and Content Placer.

Now the text that was previously highlighted in pink is now no longer highlighted, and the font is changed to Verdana Bold.