Missing fonts message

[Steve Rickaby]

At 09:03 -0700 8/2/07, Van Boening, Tammy wrote:

>I had this information saved once before from the list, but can find it now. When I open several documents received from an outside source, I get a missing font message. That's fine - I know what to do to get rid of the message, but what I really would like to do is find these errant fonts in the document themselves and replace them with the proper fonts. I remember something back in the fuzzy recesses of my aging memory about saving to .mif and searching, but. . .am I really off-base or ???

Tammy... I'm unsure about your use of the term 'correct' here. If the fonts are missing, the document requires them, so the simplest way to avoid the issue is to get hold of the fonts it uses and install them.

Failing that, you can take several approaches:

. You can tell FrameMaker to alias fonts in the maker.ini file. This makes it, say, treat every request for Helvetica as a request for Arial. The 'correct' font identities remain coded into the source files. This process is described in one of the online guides, I think the multiple platforms one.

. You can use the Find dialog to search for instances of the missing fonts. The missing font family is still selectable in the character style options dialog of the find dialog, it's just grayed out. When you find the errant paragraph, character or table tags, you can redefine the tag to use a font you already have (although the identity of the original font is then lost). Don't forget to search on master and reference pages too: in my case an interminably persistent instance of Arial turned out to be the A-line text used to label graphical objects on a reference page, i.e. something that had absolutely no relevance to the printed output from the document!

. If, once you have done all of the above, you are still getting missing font messages, you can save the errant file to MIF and use a text editor to search for font instances. The online MIF reference guide, or your own inspection, will tell you which tags to search for. FrameMaker has a talent for ferreting font ids away in really obscure places, such as parts of a table style that you never use.

. The absolute bottom line, when you've done the above, is to open and re-save the documents with 'Remember missing fonts' unchecked in FrameMaker's preferences. This causes FrameMaker to forget the fonts and use its own substitutions. If the missing font messages are coming from tags you never use, this probably won't matter. Sometimes its the only way to make FrameMaker shut up.

-- 
Steve