I’ve an award design file that complained about a missing font as I opened it (Myriad Pro if that’s interesting). As most of the file is static text-looking shapes, I didn’t think much of it. I have two fields that I mess w in this file - the award recipient’s name and and the date range for their service. I edited both the name and the date and went on about alignment and what not and burned the thing. My eyes caught the date text being incorrect too late.
Looking at the pseudo-text field, I thought in the copying and pasting I might have just not pasted and was kicking myself. But when I double-click to edit, the correct text is in the edit area of the “Edit Text Shape” dialog. I noticed all the typical font options were disabled in the dialog. Closing the dialog, it registered there was some disconnect between what LB was holding and what it was showing. Right-clicking the pseudo-text field showed a “Convert to Text” option. If I executed “Convert to Text”, then the contents of the “Edit Text Shape” dialog are immediately hydrated in the text field. It dawned on me as this happened, that the missing font behavior must be what I’m seeing. Sure enough the physical/resulting font height had changed and all the typical font options were editable.
In wanting to retrace my steps and verify, I tapped cmd-z a few times to walk backwards and see what I wanted to see/verify. LB crashed trying to render the text, I think at the spot it was trying to remake it as pseudo-text field (I have the dump that apple presents post-crash).
Perhaps the “Edit Text Shape” should force text field conversion when the user hits Ok if the state of the underlying text has changed? Or, some intimation that hitting Ok would do so because the original font is missing. Or, maybe less obscure, pseudo text fields could display differently. When not using the “Edit Text Shape” dialog, the text is effectively uneditable - they should probably at minimum behave the same.