Finding Fonts

[Fred Ridder]

Mike Wickham wrote:> Another way to find missing fonts is to create an Index of References and 
> specify fonts. FrameMaker will generate a document with a hyperlink to the 
> locations of each of the fonts used. You can follow a link and change the 
> font. I don't believe this method will find fonts on master or reference 
> pages, however.
 
This is a useful trick to have in your toolbox, but it will only find places where
the unavailable font actually occurs in the body of your document. As Mike
points out, it will not find any occurrences on master pages or reference pages.
 
But the really nasty thing about the unavailable fonts message is that the font
itself never has to occur in the text of the document. You'll still get the message
if there is any format specification that names that font, even if you never use
that format definition anywhere. And the font specification can be pretty deeply
nested inside a format; for example, table formats include the formatting of every
paragraph in the heading row, the first body row, the footing row, and the title
(even if the title isn't used), and any of those paragraphs can potentially have
a format override that uses the unavailable font. Examining the document in MIF
is the only practical way to find these.
 
You can also get the unavailable fontsmessage if the offending font is used in 
a graphic, even if that graphic is inserted by reference. This you'll never see 
in the MIF, and turning off "remember font names" will not fix it because the 
font is not actually in the FrameMaker file.
 
And the strangest one I've ever seen bit me recently. It was a text-only file,
so there was no issue of the font being in a graphic. Turning off "remember
font names" didn't fix it. The font name was nowhere to be found in the MIF,
either, but converting the MIF back to FM *did* fix the problem. Eventually
I found that there had been a new text frame added on one of the the 
reference pages that somehow had a meaningless, extraneous font spec
attached to it that named the unavailable font. Completely invisible!
 
-Fred Ridder