How to prevent font family changes when converting from unstruct to structured FM?

[depaulfm]

I'm having difficulties especially with the Symbol Font Family. 

I'm following the standard steps of converting an unstructured document, ie, first generating the conversion table from the document itself and, then "Structure" -> "Utilities" -> "Structured Current Document". However, the converted file has all the "Symbol Font Family" characters as Times New Roman. 

Is there an automatic way to tell FM to preserve the Font Family of each character?

PS: Tried to upload fm files, but this page keeps telling me the file wasn't fm. Thus, I'm uploading snapshots...

[frameexpert]

If your symbol characters are wrapped in a specific element, you can set up your EDD to apply a character format to that element when you apply your finished structured template. If you want more information, post screenshots of the Structure View next to the document view. Thanks.

[depaulfm]

Just updated my original question with both the png files with the structure view and the conversion table generated by

framemaker.

Thanks!

[Lynne A. Price · Accepted solution]

Depaul,

   All formatting in the structured document is determined by its element structure. Any text range, whether its a single character in the Symbol font, or several emphasized sentences within a paragraph, that you want to preserve in the structured document need to have a character tag that your conversion table can map to an element. There are a couple of ways you can assign such a character format:

1. In the unstructured document, create a new character format for this purpose. Apply the format to one place where it's needed. Use Edit > Copy Special to copy the format to the clipboard. Then, in Find/Change, search for the Symbol font family, in the Change pull-down menu select By Pasting and click Change All. You can change an entire book this way. It is wise to make sure you have a backup first.

2. File > Utilities > Create and Apply Formats makes sure every variation of a character and a paragraph format is tagged. For example, if you have three untagged font changes, this command might create a format called CharFnt for the first one, CharFmt1 for the second, and CharFmt2 for the third. If you have one particular paragraph tagged Body that is set to start at the top of the place, this command might create a format called Body1 and apply it to this paragraph.

Create and Apply Formats can be very useful. Use with care, because the formats it creates for different files, even in one book, will be different depending on the vareiant formats it encounters in each file. You can use it in one file, import formats from that file into the next one, and then use the command in the second file to ensure that variations that occur in both files will be tagged the same way. Then import formats from the second file into the third one and so forth.

Once all your formatting changes are tagged, modify your conversion table to account for your new formats and structure your documents again.

      --Lynne

[depaulfm]

Lynne,

Thanks for the multiple options. These helped me figure out the reason I had so many untagged elements. Your suggestion combined with frameexpert 's alusion to set up the Parapgrah/Font formats rules in EDD (using the "Using this qualifier" from the conversion table) solved the problem

[Bob_Niland]

It appears you are doing ∞ as code point A5h (\xb4 in FM notation for Symbol font).

The simple solution is to see if your desired document font supports Unicode code point U+221E (\u221e in FM notation), for example Source Sans Pro does. This way, no Character Formats (or overrides) are required, and the intended glyphs are much more likely to survive the publishing workflow.

Just experimenting with this, in basic HTML or HTML5 [default] publish workflow, the ¥ with overlay Symbol font is encoded as [¥], which is no surprise.

A plain ∞, or as a variable defined as \u221e, renders to HTML as expected.

[depaulfm]

Bob, thanks for pointing out the unicode which helped understand what was going on from that point-of-view.