FM9 incorrectly displays fonts

[N Med]

We recently upgraded to FM9 from FM7, Windows XP. We use several languages in our documents (Greek, Polish, French, Geman, etc). Our documents display fonts correctly in FM7, but when we open them in FM9, we get incorrect display of the Arial Greek and Arial CE fonts.

As a test, I then opened a document in FM9 and copied a portion of incorrect Greek text, and special pasted the text into FM7. The incorrect font displayed correctly.

I copied the correct Greek text from FM7 back into the original FM9 document, and the text displayed correctly. Saved, reopened the FM9 document and the text remained correct. I could change size, pitch, etc and it works correctly.

I copied the text in FM9 and re-pasted it back "special paste" as text to the document to see if it would change as it did in FM7. It still displays incorrectly.

The font shown in all cases was Arial Greek (both FM9 and FM7).

I now appear to have a work around for our Framemaker users, but I would like a more permanent solution.

Any suggestions on how to get the correct fonts to display in FM9 for Arial Greek and Arial CE ?

Thanks.

[Art Campbell]

Assuming that the Adobe PDF printer is set as your system default or through the SetPrint add in....

And I'd open all the component files in the book. SaveAs them to MIF, then open them and save as .FM.   This is my SOP for any files from a previous version that I open in 9.  You can do this at the book level if you install the eval copy of MIF2Go  from omsys.com -- it  installs a WashToMif utility on the Files menu that works for all the  files in the book.

[Art Campbell]

And....

One of the biggest changes migrating from 7 is the newer release's support of Unicode fonts and characters. Especially with your multiple languages, I'd expect that you'll have some clean up work to do, and that may extend into needing to get new fonts files if your older set do not support Unicode.

[Arnis Gubins]

Which version of FM9 (Help > About) are you using? The latest is FM9.0p250.

Going from FM7 to FM9 means that you are going from a non-unicode environment (only the first 255 characters in a font are displayed, i.e. the codepage-specific CE, Greek, Baltic, etc.) to a unicode environment (where the entire range of the Arial font is available). IIRC, there were issues in the initial release of FM9 with the codepage mappings to the complete font that were fixed in subsequent patches.

[Michael_Müller-Hillebrand]

Dear »N Med«,

Have you tried opening the FM7 files with a fully patched FM9?

Arial Greek and Arial CE are not fonts, you won’t find them in your fonts folder (or in the PDFs font info). Those font list entries are created by Windows using certain registry entries as subsets of Arial. In a Unicode-aware environment you don’t need those anymore. Usually the migration uses those steps:

* Open document with Arial CE, all characters appear as desired.

* Apply new template which uses only Arial (Yes, you can have a single template for all European languages!), nothing changes

If you need to use the clipboard, either copy from a Unicode-document format (like a PDF file) or you have to switch the system locale of your computer. Text copied from FM7 to the clipboard is transformed to Unicode, based on the system locale setting. If you would change your system locale to Greece, it would work with Arial Greek text.

Tell us, what you finally did.

- Michael

PS: Be prepared to see that the content of markers (e.g. Index entries) in non-Western languages does not transform correctly. There is no font information, so the product has no indicator how to treat the collection of bytes. If marker content is important, there are plug-ins available that change markers into paragraphs and vice versa.