Replacing legacy fonts in many FrameMaker books

[Guest]

I'm "new" to FrameMaker in that I haven't used it for about 10 years, and I recently started at a company that hasn't had a writer for a couple years. I inherited a doc set with about 65 FrameMaker books, each with about 6-10 chapters. The trouble is that the books use several versions of fonts that are obsolete. I contacted the font manufacturer, and they said that they couldn't guarantee that any fonts we purchase would work. I would rather replace the fonts with fonts that I already have.

I could go in and replace the fonts using the Fonts pod, but it doesn't seem to let me replace per book. As far as I can tell, I would need to change every font in every file in each of my 65 books. Is there an included way to group font updates, or is it time for me to learn scripting?

[Bob_Niland]

What version of Frame? FM10 may have improved global clean-up capabilities.

... or is it time for me to learn scripting?

I'm pretty sure there are aftermarket scripts to do this already, but I find it's pretty easy to accomplish by MIF hacking.

[AxialInfo]

There's some great advice in this thread:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/858017

Alas and alack, however, the forum search capability is sadly (and seemingly irretrievably) hosed, so you might also use Advanced search in Google, by using the following in a search window:

Also, do note the information about the issues involving the changes to FM8 and above with Unicode fonts, as you will undoubtedly find that there are characters in your old docs that will not make the transition to a new font, and they can be very, very tricky to find.

[Maike_Roder · Accepted solution]

Hi,

that's right.

We could automate this with Finalyser, but this would be effectively a bigger tool (Plug-in or ExtendScript) because the book don't know the font substitution.

Therefore for this moment another solution for you:

Edit your maker.ini and change the fonts like that:
+ Search [UnknownToKnownFontMap]
+ Sample:  Helvetica, *, *, *=Arial, *, *, *

Now, if you open a book/the chapters, the font will be replaced by the new one.

- Maike

[Guest]

Thank you everyone. I appreciate the search help, as I wondered why that wasn't working.

I'm using FrameMaker 10. I edited the maker.ini and delselected Remember Missing Font Names. It's an efficient solution for my problem.

I wanted to add related information about legacy fonts. (Thanks to Adobe Support for their help.) When I saved to PDF, the fonts appeared incorrectly in the output PDF, and the fonts also changed in the source FrameMaker files.

Because my fonts were older, the color scheme was CMYK. When I saved to PDF, I had to select Convert CMYK Colors to RGB in the PDF Setup for Selected Files dialog box. After I tried this, my output was correct and my source files did not change.