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Missing font in equations

Forum|Forum|3 months ago
October 21, 2025
4 replies
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I am editing som FM documents that were created in - I believe - FM 4 or 5. There is a lot of equations and they look allright. But not ALL of them. Some look like this:

It looks like there is a missing font with the "?Plus Symbol?"... I don't have a lot of experience using the equation editor but the font palette does not show any missing fonts. What might be the issue here?

Correct answer FrameMaker-dk

So... this question bewildered me. Eventually I figured it out.

It is possible to create your own math definitions and these reside on the reference pages. When I applied a new template to this old project, I did not take into account that I should preserve the math definitions. Well... now I and you know! 🙂

F

FrameMaker-dk

AuthorCorrect answer

Community Expert

So... this question bewildered me. Eventually I figured it out.

It is possible to create your own math definitions and these reside on the reference pages. When I applied a new template to this old project, I did not take into account that I should preserve the math definitions. Well... now I and you know! 🙂

Bjørn Smalbro - FrameMaker.dk

Barb Binder

Community Expert

Hi Bjørn: can you share a screen shot of the reference page? This is new to me.

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

F

FrameMaker-dk

Author

Community Expert

Absolutely. Here you go. And it IS amazing that having worked with this software since 1995 new, old features pops up!

Bjørn Smalbro - FrameMaker.dk

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Winfried Reng

Community Expert

Hi Bjørn,

Did you check which font you use?

Open the equation editor (Insert | Equations) and in the Equations menu click Equation Fonts.

There you can see which font is used.

When you open the font with a character map app (e.g. Babelmap), you see that there are numerous PLUS characters. Possibly your font misses the exact PLUS character which is used here.

When you save as MIF and open with e.g. MIFBRowse, you get the exact FrameMaker version and you could check, if the MIF code gives you more info.

@Klaus Göbel has a free add-on which shows the Unicode code.

https://4xscripts.com/en/add-ons-main/scripts/complementary-functions/showcharcode

Best regards, Winfried

F

FrameMaker-dk

Author

Community Expert

I suspect this issue is abot equations made before the days of Unicode. I don't have an overview as to how many of the equatioins that are affected, but changing font from the Baskerville used, to Century Schoolbook makes no difference. It may eventually be easier to just rewrite the equations, I think.

Bjørn Smalbro - FrameMaker.dk

W

Winfried Reng

Community Expert

But aren't equation and equationvariable just character formats?

Can you just adapt these character formats?

I do not know, what is behind "Symbol". I do not have this character or paragraph format.

And if it's a font, I cannot change it to something else.

Barb Binder

Community Expert

Hi Bjørn:

When you click an insertion point in the equation and press the spacebar (which is used to select equation elements) does it select the ?Plus symbol? together or individually?

And do you have access to how that equation appeared in print or in a PDF? I wonder if it might be one of the Relations which all have ?s on both sides of the operator.

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training