When sending a file to your printer, always be sure to convert all your text to outlines.

Here is a scenario.

You’ve got a design for a new tradeshow, banner stand, flyer or even something as simple as a business card. The design is perfect. You love it. You (or your designer) have spent many long hours on the project, matching colours and making sure sizes and bleeds are up to spec. Making sure it fits your company and your brand.

You’re given the green light (or you give the green light), and send it off to print. You notice your printer accepts a few different file types (.ai, .psd, .eps and so on). Great. Your file is already an .ai file, as you made it in Illustrator. (Maybe .eps, you get my point. These tips should be used even if you are sending your file as a pdf.)


This is how it looks on your computer.

After sending it off, you wait patiently for a screen proof to return from your printer. It shows up, and you notice when you open the file that either some, or all, of your fonts have changed. It’s all wrong. Or, better yet, your printer comes back and asks for you to convert your text to outlines.


How your file is seen on another computer.

What happened?

Fonts on your computer are specific to your computer. Yes, quite a few are installed by default on most computers, like ‘Times New Roman’ or some ‘Arial, but there is no guarantee that the font you’ve used will be universal. Even if you use ‘Garamond’, your designer or printer might have a slightly different (ie: ‘Adobe Garamond Pro’) which might cause unnecessary font substitutions.

Their program (ie Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, etc...) will automatically fill in a substitute font in place of yours, which is not something we want to happen.

So what can you do?

After your files are tweaked and perfected, just before they’re ready to be sent to your printer, you can convert all your text to outlines.

What does that mean?

Short answer, it makes all your text into shapes.

** Please note that this means it will no longer be editable, so save a back-up of your file with the text preserved for future use. There is nothing worse than opening an old file to update a minor text entry only to find that everything has been flattened. **

To do this, depending on your design program of choice, takes two easy steps.

I am going to use Adobe Illustrator, but the steps work for InDesign too.


First of all, select all of the text in your file (Ctrl+A, or the top menu Select > Select All). Nothing will happen to any other objects, so do not worry about selecting everything here. If you’ve set-up you file so that all your text is on one layer, even better.


Secondly, select Type > Create Outlines from the top menu.


You will notice the base line for the type is gone, and the letters are now outlined. They are no longer editable text, and will retain their appearance.

Text to Outlines

Now you can send this file for printing. Simple.

Aside from sending files to your printer, converting text to outlines is a must for creating logos or corporate identities. There is no telling who will end up needing to put a company’s logo in a design, or what fonts may or may not be installed on their systems.