Zapf Dingbats mystery

[Les Smalley]

I received a reply directly that may shed additional light on this question.

It is always important to know what changed when things that once worked nicely suddenly go awry, so finding out if a system update or other "external" activity may have occurred which might be the source of the font problems is valuable advice.

However, I did not think ATM is needed on any Windows XP / Vista system, but if installed very well could be the source of the problem, especially in conjunction with some other update to the environment.

— Lester

--- On Tue, 2/24/09, Karen Mann <kmann at i-t-tech.com> wrote:
I recently went through this mystery - MS downloaded an update over a weekend and on a Monday not one of 5 different computers could print a type 1 from FM 7.x.  This involves ATM and Type
 1 fonts. XP (especially with sp3) and Vista were never designed to function with ATM. It ruins the font mapping. 

We had to uninstall ATM, apply a ATM hotfix (use the correct one there are two, one forDeluxe and one for Light), upgrade to FM 9 and Acrobat to at least V7. Then through FM 9 change out the Type 1 fonts to Open Type.  We switched from Times to Times New Roman and Helvetica to Arial and no problem printing.

FM 7.x does not support Open Type and FM 9 does, and FM 9 requires Acrobat V7 or above.

We choose to update our fonts Open Type/True Type .ttf and not Open Type .otf.
There is a difference there.

Karen M 
-----Original Message-----

Does your colleague actually have the Zapf Dingbat font installed?  Did this
happen in FM 6 also or did the dingbat characters display correctly?

Do any error messages appear in the FM console window when opening the
document, especially a message to
 the effect that the Dingbat font is not
available and another font (such as Times New Roman) will be used?

I will guess that this is the case, and when he sends the document back to you
who does have the font, it opens normally.  This is a feature of FrameMaker -
it can make a temporary font substitution so editing can proceed, but when
opened on a system with the correct typefaces available the file will show them.

– Lester

--- On Tue, 2/24/09, Steve Rickaby <srickaby at wordmongers.demon.co.uk>
wrote:
I'm wrestling with this one on behalf of a remote colleague...

He's just upgraded from FrameMaker 6 to FrameMaker 7.1 on Win XP-Pro SP3.

After doing so, he finds that all his Zapf Dingbats characters are rendering as
plaintext, even though the Character Designer says that the font is Dingbats, as
expected.

I'm on Mac and don't have enough experience of Windows
 FrameMaker
installations to fox this out. If he sends me a sample document, the Dingbats
appear correctly in FrameMaker 7.1 for Mac. Both of us see what would be
expected in the Character Designer.

Is this some Windows thing, perhaps?
-- 
Steve