Help: File gone berserk

[Philip Sharman]

Wow, this is very strange.

I've been running into this same issue lately, so I did a quick test and
that hidden table format is well and truly hidden, even from MIF which
really surprised me.  If I export the file to MIF and open it with a text
editor, there is no mention of the missing font anywhere in the MIF file.
And yet FrameMaker insists it is there, every time I open the FM file.  But
the good news is that exporting to MIF and then opening the MIF from inside
FrameMaker finally kills off the zombie table definition.  (So does
unchecking "Remember Missing Font Names" in the preferences, but that might
change more than you want.)

This is using FrameMaker 7.2. I don't know if the behavior is any different
in later versions.

To make simpler, I think we should all stick to Courier New :-)
   Philip.

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 5:38 AM, Chris Despopoulos <
despopoulos_chriss at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Concerning missing fonts messages even though you have tried all the tricks
> to clear that font out of your document...
>
> There's a known issue with FrameMaker -- Maker stores font information with
> table formats. I think this is how it goes... If you copy/paste a table into
> your document, and it's not identical to an existing table format in your
> document, Maker creates a new table format under the covers, and stores font
> information with it. If you copied from a document that uses font X, then
> your document will now expect to have font X whenever it opens.
>
> The new table format can be created such that you have no direct access to
> the format definition.  That means that you can't change the font
> definition.  These table formats aren't even exposed to the API, which means
> you can't get a plugin or FrameScript tool to fix the problem -- believe me,
> if it was exposed to the API there would be fixes available.
>
> The only fix I know of is to open the file in MIF and search/replace the
> font name.  I think you need to replace all variants of the font name, but
> I'm not sure...  I'm kind of font-stupid, and I'm not sure what MIF does
> with incomplete font declarations.  I have always removed all variants of
> the name...
>
> I suppose another thing to try would be to copy/paste all the content from
> your document into a new file built with a clean template.  This would
> assume that the offending font is never included in any of the visible
> content, and you have no format overrides.  I haven't tried this -- it just
> occurs to me now.  Who knows...  I could work.
>
> I really wish Adobe would expose this information in the API.
>
> cud
>
>
>