Missing Fonts

[Fred Ridder]

Howard Rauch asked:

> Ths is perhaps an elementary question. I have to finish a project off-site. I am using another person's computer, but working on my own  computer through remote access. I need to distill a book to PDF, but the computer I am using does not have all the fonts. "Remember Missing Font Names" is turned on. If I distill the book on this computer and send the file to the offset printer, will the correct fonts be included int printed document? Or am I better off waiting until I can distil the book on my own computer?


FrameMaker's "remember missing font names" feature allows you to work on the *content* of a document, but you can only properly finish and publish the document on a system that has all the specified fonts installed on it. When you are working in "missing fonts" mode, FrameMaker does not have access to the font metrics (the glyph dimensions) for the proper font, so it can only use the metrics for the substitution font, which will allways be slightly different. And when you remember that a small difference in the font metrics can make any given line break one word earlier or later, and that a line break change can affect the length of the paragraph, and a change in the length of a paragraph can affect where the page breaks, and changes in page breaks can add up to push large objects like figures to different pages and even throw off what page the following chapter starts on. The final pagination and generated file update and the generation of the PS/PDF *must* be performed on a system that has the proper fonts installed. If you make a PostScript file on the "missing fonts" system, the PostScript and any PDF that is distilled from it will only contain the substitution font and will not match a PDF of the book that is created on the properly configured system.

-Fred Ridder