Zapf Dingbats bad font replacement in FM10

[rlauriston]

FM10 unstructured, Windows 7 64-bit, working with documents I inherited in which a Zapf Dingbats character tag was used for bullets in paragraph tags.

Opening one of those documents gives the message, "The 'Zapfdingbats' Font is not available. It will be replaced by 'AdobePiStd'." Bullets appear as question marks.

ZapfDingbats BT is installed and appears in the FM font menus. If I change the Bullet character tag from Adobe Pi Std to ZapfDingbats BT, the bullets look right.

The conversion is set in maker.ini as follows:

Zapfdingbats, *,*= Adobe Pi Std,*,*

I tried deleting that line, had no effect. I tried replacing it with the following, had no effect:

Zapfdingbats, *,*= ZapfDingbats BT,*,*

Is there some system-level way to fix this? It would be annoying to have to update the style in every document.

[Mike Wickham]

I haven't tried it, but I think that should be:

Zapfdingbats, *, *, *= ZapfDingbats BT, *, *, *

And be sure it is in the section, not

section.

> Zapfdingbats, ,= ZapfDingbats BT,,

[rlauriston]

Something's scrambled in that post.

[Mike Wickham]

Dang. Once again, the forum software scrambled my post. Let's try again. Here's a repost:

I haven't tried it, but I think that should be:

Zapfdingbats, *, *, *= ZapfDingbats BT, *, *, *

And be sure it is in the [UnknownToKnownFontMap] section, not [WindowsToFrameFontAliases] section.

> Zapfdingbats, *,*= ZapfDingbats BT,*,*

[rlauriston]

Tried that, no change.

Tried deleting Adobe Pi Std and mapping it to ZapfDingbats BT, no change.

I guess I'll call Adobe support.

[Mike Wickham]

I forgot to mention that, starting with FM10, you can do font

replacement easily. Open the Fonts pod, click the missing ZapfDingbats

font and then click the Replace button. The Fonts Replace pod will open

and you will be able to specify the BT version of the font as a

permanent replacement. Of course, that assumes you aren't trading the

file back to someone who wants it to continue to use the original font.

[rlauriston]

I don't want to have to make any changes to the books or documents if I can avoid it. If I have to do that, I'll edit the styles to use the bullet characters in the bullet paragraph tags' font and purge all use of dingbat fonts.

[Bob_Niland]

> If I have to do that, I'll edit the styles to use the bullet characters in the bullet paragraph tags' font and purge all use of dingbat fonts.

If these documents ever need to be opened in an FM version earlier than 8.0, using native bullets probably won't work, as they will probably be Unicode (UTF8) code points that will be treated as three nearly random characters.

I'd suggest instead converting all instances to a Variable, so that managing them can be done in one place per document.

On a legacy platform:

Var Name: char.dingbat.bullet

Var Def: <Dingbat>\xc6

Char Fmt: Dingbat is defined to be font family Zaph Dingbats

On a Unicode platform:

Var Name: char.dingbat.bullet

Var Def: <Dingbat>\u2022

Char Fmt: Dingbat is defined to be any font family that has code point 2022 populated, perhaps even just set to "As Is".

[rlauriston]

They'll never need to be opened in anything older than FM10.

Bullet characters from the font used by the bullet paragraph tags work fine in a wide variety of output formats. I've been using them in documents I created from scratch and in one document I cleaned up.

[rlauriston]

I couldn't get font substitution to work, so I just hacked Adobe Pi Std with Type Light to add the bullet glyphs and map them to l and n. Didn't work until I figured out I needed to reboot Windows to apply the font change.

Still not working, but it's no longer a font substitution issue so I'll start another thread.

[Arnis_Gubins · Accepted solution]

Robert,

Why not just get a Postscript version of ZapfDingbats and install it on your machine? I still use it on my Win7 64-bit platform with no issues. This would save a lot of hassles.

[rlauriston]

I already have Zapf Dingbats BT on my machine, which works fine, but FrameMaker is substituting Adobe Pi Std instead. I have no reason to believe that buying another version of Zapf Dingbats would make FrameMaker behave any better.

[Arnis_Gubins]

Simply comment out the subsitution line the maker.ini file, e.g.

; Zapfdingbats, *,*= Adobe Pi Std,*,*

[rlauriston]

I already tried that and it didn't work.

[Bob_Niland]

On newer Windows & Frames, there is more than one maker.ini. The user-specific one is read last, as I recall.

[rlauriston]

Interesting, but FM10 seems to have copied the changes from the maker.ini in my user settings directory to the copy in the FM10 program directory.

[rlauriston]

That worked, thanks. I installed a Type 1 copy of Zapf Dingbats from an Illustrator 7 CD-ROM, commented out the substitution, replaced the hacked font, deleted .font_cache, rebooted, and it's working fine.

And I guess the fundamental problem was that the documentation department's master font directory contained only the .pfm, not the .pfb.