I won't go so far as Willi to say you should never outline fonts, but in general it's a bad practice for a couple of reasons:
- The outlining of text will degrade the typographic quality of the text. Why is this? The glyphs are turned into normal graphics which lack the intelligence that fonts have in displaying or printing text, particularly on lower resolution devices. Fonts have hinting built in, which makes them look good at low resolution. This is lost when you outline type.
- Certain attributes will be lost when outlining because they are not part of the font itself, but are applied by InDesign. Try adding these features to your InDesign type?underlining, strikethrough, bullets applied with the Bullets & Numbering feature, or footnotes. Then select the text and choose Type > Create Outlines. Guess what: Those attributes just disappear!
I wrote about this in 2007 in InDesignSecrets.com:
http://indesignsecrets.com/outlining-fonts-is-it-necessary.php
As for your ugly and fairly unlikely scenario, Obi-wan, you can accomplish the same thing without outlining by creating an inline graphic. As you can see mine is still editable and doesn't lose the font quality:
