Is it possible to automate font substitution in Illustrator CS5?

Question

I'm creating a custom PDF catalog by grabbing pages from other companies PDFs (I do have permission to do so) but I'm having problems though because I do not have the same fonts installed on my machines.

Adobe Illustrator substitutes the missing fonts, however the sizes are way off. I've found font substitutions that work great, however I can't find a way to automate this when I open the file. For each page, I have to go to Type > Find Font, and manually pick.

Is there any way to automate this otherwise there is a lot of tedious work that needs to be done manually.

Answer 1

In looking at the CS4 Applescript API (sorry, I don't have CS5, but the APIs haven't changed in really significant ways for a couple versions now), font substitution upon opening a PDF isn't available. But it is possible to change fonts after a document is opened by examining all of the objects and acting accordingly to the type and properties applied to a text object.

The caveat, and it's a doozy, is that you would need to set some kind of parameters you wish to change and what you want to change those to, which I imagine would mean knowing what fonts in the target document. But a script like that goes way beyond this site and possibly even Stackoverflow. Automating Illustrator is not a trivial exercise.

Answer 2

IMHO, the best solution is to install the missing fonts. Kills all your problem.

If you can't do this, and you have to open the same archive more than once, simply saving the file will save the new fonts substitutions and voila'.

I think there is no other solution without scripting and/or automator.