Find Replace Certain character in certain font

[KrupStar]

I need major help. I am reformatting a catalog that was created in Pagemaker. The file opened in InDesign but there are all these "Math Symbols" (ex: ? ?) that came in as number, highlighted pink, ofcourse, since I do not have the font. Well there are 1000's of them in this section of the catalog and to go through and change them all would take hours and hours, which I don't have.

Is there any way to specify a certain character within a certain font (even if I don't have the font) and change all of them? For example, everytime there should be ?, instead there is a highlighted 8.

Any help would be appreciated GREATLY!

 

[Lessa]

well, you can start by going to the type menu and selecting "change font" and you can change the missing font to something you have.

There's also the find/change command under edit menu. Copy the incorrect character, go to format button and select the font and size, if you want, and then type in it's replacement in the change line.

 

[KrupStar]

Ok, I tried changing it to Zap Dingbats and there are two characters I am having problems with, the ? which shows up as "8" and the ? which shows up as "7", so if I do a change and replace it iwll change all the 7's even the ones I don't wan tchanged. And when I tried to copy and past the dingbat which was a bold X in the change box it keep coming up as an 8.

I need to specify a specific font and character to change and I am not sure if that is possible,

 

[Lessa]

yes, you can do that.

go to find/change, type your bad character in the top box, click the 'more options' button, then click the format button under "find format settings" and select the old font and size and whatever else is unique to the characters.

then type the correct character in the 'change to' box at the top. Now go to 'change format settings' and click the 'format' button and make the font zapf dingbats and whatever else you need it to be (ie new color, baseline shift, differnent size).

If you go thru this process and get pink boxes, you need to put the unicode in the 'change to' box (instead of an "n" for a black box, for instance). To find the unicode for your character, go to glyphs under the type menu, select the font (zapf dingabats). Then run your cursor over the character you want and it will tell you the unicode for it. Type that into your change box rather than the character.