Missing font in FM although it shows fine in Word?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 08:45 -0800 1/11/06, Rene Stephenson wrote:

>In our current templates, we have a character tag called EmphasisBold that specifies everything "As Is" except ... The problem is, when the EmphasisBold (bold+italic) char tag is applied to any text in an FM file that uses the Minion Web font family, FM generates the "unavailable font" error and displays it instead as italic Minion Web in regular weight (sans bold).
>
>I'm guessing it's something about the differences in virtual handling of fonts between MS and Adobe, but I have no idea what the solution would be. I did research the Minion Web font at Adobe, and it looks to me like there's not a bold italic version in that font, which I found surprising. So, can someone please explain to me what's going on and suggest some options for a solution? I wouldn't know where to begin to find a similar-looking font to Minion to use as a sub for that char tag...if there such a place/function even exists. (Obviously, I'm no typesetter...)

Rene - You have more or less explained what I think is going on. When you select a face in Word for a font that doesn't actually *have* that face, Word synthesises it, in the case of italics by slanting the Roman face, and Bold by emboldening the Roman face, so I guess bold italic by doing both. The results are usually ghastly. Word does this silently. In fact, if the correct face *is* present, it can sometimes be hard to get Word to use it in response to the 'I' or 'B' buttons, which are actually the Spawn of the Devil and should be removed, as they encourage people to use local mark-up instead of the correct Way of the Styles ;-)

Right, now FrameMaker. Until recently, I would have said that FrameMaker does the correct thing: if a face is not present in a font, such as in your case Minion Bold Italic, FrameMaker gives you a 'missing font warning' and does nothing else. Hence, in this case, Bold Italics would show up as Romans. However, I have recently seen FrameMaker synthesize an italic - but it did give a missing font warning too. So in my recent experience, FrameMaker is a little non-deterministic here, because I've also seen it leave all italics as Romans where the Italic face was absent. This behavior may vary between versions and/or platforms. The point is that it tells you that there is a missing font.

Does this help at all?

You can find Minion Bold Italic here:

<http://www.adobe.com/type/browser/F/MINI/F_MINI-10012300.html>

or here:

<http://www.fonts.com/findfonts/detail.htm?pid=201866&grab_id=0&page_id=8078&query=%22minion%20bold%20italic%22&SCOPE=Fonts>

As for selecting fonts generally, here's a slew of on-line fount shops:

<http://www.myfonts.com/>

<http://www.adobe.com/type/index.html>

<http://www.linotype.com/>

<http://www.fonts.com/>

<http://www.fontfinder.com/>

<http://www.fontfont.com/>

<http://www.fontshop.com/>

<http://www.bitstream.com/fonts/index.html>

-- 
Steve