Arial Baltic does not work on fm7/fm8

Arnis - That's odd, because when I try to use unicode characters in Frame 8 with the old "synthetically derived" fonts (dummy 256-character fonts derived from the unicode Arial font), they work for me. The FM 8 document text actually contains unicode characters, and FM 8 rather cleverly backmaps the characters to display the glyphs from the old synthetic font correctly. Not only that, but when I open a Russian FM 5.5 document in FM 8 it even remaps from 1251 to unicode on the fly - the converted document looks the same and uses the same old synthetic font but the document is now unicode in FM 8 and I can then change to a different a unicode font to see the same proper Russian characters in a proper unicode font. (!)

Carlo - But your original question was about FM 7. It is possible that the two machines in question have different entries for the "NonTextFamilies" listing in their maker.ini files. This listing is under the heading of "Frame font families that will not be spell-checked" but the setting actually does more than this. It controls one aspect of font mapping. If a font is included in this list then it is used "as is", without remapping, and all character slots are available . If the font is not in this list then it is processed by the famous (or infamous) ANSI-to-Frame remapping system, and some slots are unavailable. It's possible that the other author had to add Arial Baltic to their NonTextFamilies list in order to use characters slots that would be unavailable otherwise.
So... either add Arial Baltic to the list, or (if it's already there) remove it, then try opening the document again.

One more note - it is possible that the automatic remapping mentioned above (when reading, say, a FM 7 document into FM 8 ) will only work on text which uses a font which is NOT in the NonTextFamilies list.

Dave

As additional info for others trying to work around this change to font handling in FM8 onwards, Arnis has many excellent troubleshooting steps and extensive explanation of the issues in threads on this forum.

For example, a forum or Google search for "code page fonts" turned up the following:

http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.3c064f60

I'm having the same problem with fm8 and fm9.
In framemaker 7 the fonts are displayed correctly but if I tried to open the files in fm8 or fm9 it get the message that the baltic/cyrillics/CE fonts (ie Arial Baltic, Times Baltic...) are unavailable... so I'm stuck using fm7... :/

MS Word or InDesign should not see a "Arial Baltic" font created using the FontSubstitutes method, because those are only for non-Unicode applications (I only checked with InDesign CS4).

This leads me to the following guess: You might have a real font with that name on your machine, which is not a subset of Arial and stops the FontSubstitute from working. Check your Fonts folder for anything like that.

- Michael

In my PC this key seems to be the same that in others PC.
As all the other programs (Word, InDesign, Illustrator,...) recognize baltic font, I don't think that the problem is here.

Hallo,
it is not a problem of version of FM.
You have change the registry key
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\FontSubstitutes]
to alow Arial Baltic (or Arial CE, Arial Tur etc.) set to be visible in FM. Search the Google or contact me ICQ 260&029&350

Sheila, my FM7 is p579, my FM8 is p277.

I think that, may be, my colleague version is not updated...

I use FM from about 15 years, but it's the first time that I have this kind of problem.

Carlo, which specific versions of FM7 and FM8 are you using, the "pxxx" numbers from the Help > About screen.

I recall that there was a fix to some unicode issues in one update of FM8.

FM 8.0p277 is the latest. If you do need to update, be sure to apply all patches that are available, in sequence from oldest to newest, because the patches are not "roll-up".

As all unicode fonts don't work (Times New Roman, Courier, ecc.) I think that is some font setting in FM, but I can't understand which setting and where I can go to set it.

I tried to unistall and reinstall FM, to copy the Windows Language Setting from my colleague's PC, uninstall and reinstall fonts, but it still doesn't work.

Well, Arial baltic is the Baltic set from Arial (unicode) font: when I use a non unicode font I see the Arial Baltic font (together with cyr, greek, CE, turk, etc). If I use an unicode font I just see Arial.
I tried to use some special baltic characters in fm7 and they don't work (but they work in MSWord or even in InDesign CS3), so I think that is my configuration error, but I don't know what.
I just changed the hard disk and installed everything, from Windows XP to FM7 and 8. I never do some special configuration for that.
What can I see?
Thanks!