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rlauriston
rlauriston
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Zapf Dingbats bad font replacement in FM10

Nov 13, 2012 2:54 PM

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.

1292 Views   16 Replies   Latest reply: rlauriston, Nov 16, 2012 1:21 PM
 
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  • Mike Wickham
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    1. Mike Wickham,
    Nov 13, 2012 5:45 PM   in reply to rlauriston
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    I haven't tried it, but I think that should be:

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

     

    And be sure it is in the Re: Zapf Dingbats bad font replacement in FM10 section, not

    Re: Zapf Dingbats bad font replacement in FM10 section.

     

    > Zapfdingbats, ,= ZapfDingbats BT,,

     
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  • Mike Wickham
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    2. Mike Wickham,
    Nov 13, 2012 5:48 PM   in reply to rlauriston
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    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.

     
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  • rlauriston
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    3. rlauriston,
    Nov 14, 2012 10:41 AM   in reply to Mike Wickham
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    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.

     
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  • rlauriston
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    4. rlauriston,
    Nov 14, 2012 10:42 AM   in reply to Mike Wickham
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    Something's scrambled in that post.

     
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  • Error7103
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    5. Error7103,
    Nov 14, 2012 11:19 AM   in reply to rlauriston
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    > 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".

     
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  • rlauriston
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    6. rlauriston,
    Nov 14, 2012 11:25 AM   in reply to Error7103
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    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.

     
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  • Mike Wickham
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    7. Mike Wickham,
    Nov 14, 2012 12:53 PM   in reply to Mike Wickham
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    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,*,*

     
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  • rlauriston
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    8. rlauriston,
    Nov 14, 2012 1:10 PM   in reply to Mike Wickham
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    Tried that, no change.

     

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

     

    I guess I'll call Adobe support.

     
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  • rlauriston
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    9. rlauriston,
    Nov 14, 2012 3:02 PM   in reply to rlauriston
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    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.

     
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  • Arnis Gubins
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    10. Arnis Gubins,
    Nov 15, 2012 10:40 AM   in reply to rlauriston
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    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.

     
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  • rlauriston
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    11. rlauriston,
    Nov 15, 2012 10:54 AM   in reply to Arnis Gubins
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    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.

     
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  • Arnis Gubins
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    12. Arnis Gubins,
    Nov 15, 2012 2:19 PM   in reply to rlauriston
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    Simply comment out the subsitution line the maker.ini file, e.g.

     

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

     
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  • rlauriston
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    13. rlauriston,
    Nov 15, 2012 2:23 PM   in reply to Arnis Gubins
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    I already tried that and it didn't work.

     
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  • Error7103
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    14. Error7103,
    Nov 15, 2012 2:28 PM   in reply to rlauriston
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    On newer Windows & Frames, there is more than one maker.ini. The user-specific one is read last, as I recall.

     
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  • rlauriston
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    15. rlauriston,
    Nov 15, 2012 3:36 PM   in reply to Error7103
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    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.

     
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  • rlauriston
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    16. rlauriston,
    Nov 16, 2012 1:21 PM   in reply to Arnis Gubins
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    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.

     
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