Working with non-existent fonts

[Combs, Richard]

Steve Rickaby wrote: 
 
> Suppose you have to work with a document or book that uses 
> fonts you do not have: you manually substitute fonts you do 
> have, *and* tell FrameMaker to forget the missing ones, to 
> get rid of all the irritating error messages. <snip> 

Well, you shouldn't have to manually substitute fonts. If you can live
with the alerts, Remember Missing Font Names takes care of the problem.
If not, you can make the appropriate substitutions automatic (at least
on the Windows side) with the proper entries in the Font Options portion
of the maker.ini file. 

The trick, of course, is coming up with the proper substitutions. See
the manuals (PDFs) _Customizing FrameMaker_ and _Working on Multiple
Platforms_ for hints, but they aren't as clear and complete as one might
hope. :-} 
 
> This discovery came about due to variations in the names of 
> Times New Roman fonts between Mac and PC platforms 
> (TimesNewRomanPS, TimesNewRomanPSMT).

You can probably resolve a name variation like this with an entry in the
[WindowsToFrameFontAliases] section of maker.ini. 

Of course, save a backup of maker.ini before making changes. And
stop/restart FM after making changes. 

The hard part is figuring out the right names to use. It would be nice
if there were a list of FrameFont names somewhere, with their common
Windows and Mac equivalents, but I havn't seen one. 

The entries in the [WindowsToFrameFontAliases] section specify the
Windows font name on the left and the corresponding FrameFont name
(which is not the same as the Mac name) on the right, with placeholders
for the variations. 

Assuming that "TimesNewRomanPSMT" is the correct Windows name of your
font, try adding this line: 

TimesNewRomanPSMT, *, *=Times New Roman, *, *, * 

I think the entry to the right of the equal sign is the correct
FrameFont entry. If it is, and if FM on the Mac uses the same FrameFont
name, that should solve the problem. 

That's the theory, anyway... :-) 

Good luck! 

Richard 


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Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
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rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-777-0436
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