Reference graphic to Character format

[Grinnell Larry-ELG001]

I've used custom fonts developed by my organization, originally in
Fontographer and now Asia FontStudio (owned by FontLab, who also now
owns Fontographer--being marketed as an entry-level product), and want
to say it's a very slippery slope. One one hand, the custom fonts make
it really easy for the writers to place inline graphics in their
documents, and as long as they have been properly authored, they work
great with our printers. We've been doing this for about 18 years, and
it is really a great solution for print/PDF oriented content. We like
the solution so much that we have developed almost 250 of these custom
fonts. 

The slippery slope factor comes in when you:

1. Have to deal with the huge quantity of fonts you have to install in
your system, bogging it down and making a naturally unstable environment
(Windows) even more unstable.
2. Have to manage all these custom fonts in a structured publishing
environment (like Structured FrameMaker)where each new font requires
editing of the DTD and EDD.
3. Need to repurpose your content for HTML or other like formats. Custom
(vector) fonts don't work in a rasterized online world. You need to find
a way to substitute back in either a vector-based graphic which can be
auto-scaled in products like ePublisher or even FrameMaker's very flawed
Save-As-HTML function, or substitute a raster file (JPEG) for each
occurrence of a custom font character. We are looking at several very
expensive solutions to permit us to offer HTML and similar deliverables
(you don't want to know what we do and how much we currently spend to
convert a document to HTML).

Larry Grinnell
954.723.8914

-------------------------------------
Message: 27
Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:13:03 -0700
From: "Matt Sullivan" <matt at grafixtraining.com>
Subject: RE: Reference graphic to Character format
To: "'Robert Rogge'" <robertwrogge at gmail.com>,	"'Framer's List'"
	<framers at lists.frameusers.com>
Message-ID: <20080912211302.CA9311CAC147 at smtp-b.omnis.com>
Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="iso-8859-1"

A common solution would be to create a font (Fontographer, etc.) that
contains your graphics assigned to individual characters. Use the
appropriate letter, apply the character format, and you are done.
(assuming
you can output the font wherever needed...)

-Matt Sullivan
GRAFIX Training, Inc.
714 960 6840