FrameMaker font issues

[jmth1974]

Framaker for PC

I have a client who sent me first some 'plain vanilla' FrameMaker manuals for Western European languages, no problems there. These were updates to previous revisions and the translations were done using Trados.

However, the problems started to come with Slovak, Greek, etc. languages. It seems that the paragraph styles (and fonts in them) are set for regular Arial and Times New Roman (TNR) as they are based on the English manual when these languages would require Arial CE or Arial Greek, since Frame does not support Unicode fonts. My question is two-fold.

First, is there an easy way to substitute all Arial and TNR fonts to Arial CE and TNR CE for example without having to go through each and every paragraph style and change this manually in all chapters? I tried importing paragraph and font formats from a previous revision, but this doesn't work and the font stays the same.

Second, to advice my client in future updates, are there any tricks to export Frame docs, use them in Trados and put them back into Frame without having to do the above. The only way I can think of to avoid this at the backend is to change the paragraph styles before bringing the Frame docs into Trados. This of course would have to be done separately for languages requiring CE, Greek, Turkish, Baltic font sets, but at least this would reduce the amount of work from changing fonts in 18 language documents to maybe 5.

Maybe this issues has been covered many times, but I'd appreaciate any help that you might be able to shed on this.

Thanks!
Jani

[Michael Rowley]

Jani:

'is there an easy way to substitute all Arial and TNR fonts to Arial CE and TNR CE for example without having to go through each and every paragraph style'

If FrameMaker has the styles 'based on', you can change the font for the basic style (e.g. 'Normal') and the font in most styles will change automatically (à la Word). Even if the styles are not based on one style, they're probably based on only a few styles.

Many people write their documents in Word first and then convert them to FrameMaker; if your client did this, you could ask him to adhere to making only a few styles the styles that all the rest follow (if he's not already doing so).

[John Spragens]

Unfortunately, FrameMaker doesn't have the "based on" approach in its styles.

What's puzzling me is that importing styles from a fixed chapter didn't work. It should ...

[Michael Rowley]

John:

'FrameMaker doesn't have the "based on" approach in its styles'

Collapse of stout party! You're right of course, but I've never noticed, having only made FrameMaker documents from my own Word documents.

In that case, the whole thing could be difficult, for although the client may be using Word (or whatever) and Open Fonts that have the necessary extra characters, those characters will not be in the same positions as in the separate TT or Type 1 fonts for the different language groups.

[Mike]

First, is there an easy way to substitute all Arial and TNR fonts to Arial CE and TNR CE for example without having to go through each and every paragraph style and change this manually in all chapters? I tried importing paragraph and font formats from a previous revision, but this doesn't work and the font stays the same.

It's ages since I used FrameMaker but could you save the document as a MIF file then open that as a text document in, say, MSWord and do a search-and-replace to change the font asignments?

If you were to change the font for the first paragraph in FM before saving the MIF file then, by inspection of the text once the MIF file is in Word should show you what substitutions to make.

I think it should be fairly easy though I've never tried it myself.

An alternative approach, without using a MIF file could be to create a new paragraph style using the CE fonts etc and use FrameMaker's search-and-replace to replace all the old-style-name paragraphs with the new styles. Do this but first applying the new style to a paragraph; then edit/copy-special/paragraph-style to the clipboard; then select edit/find; choose paragraph-tag in the find box and enter the name of the old paragraph style; select by-pasting in the change pop-up. Test it out and if it works do a replace-all.

Don't know if either of those ideas will solve your problem but they're the best I can think of this early in the morning. :)

[Michael Rowley]

Mike:

' create a new paragraph style using the CE fonts etc and use FrameMaker's search-and-replace to replace all the old-style-name paragraphs with the new styles'

That seems to be the only possibility in FrameMaker at present (which version, I wonder?). But the FM file could be saved as an RTF file and imported into Word; then each style could be converted via search-and-replace into its equivalent with the new fonts.

But still, I think, there would be difficulty with OpenType/old-type conversions: not all letters match. FM is clearly on the way out for languages for which Western Latin fonts can't be used, once OT fonts are in wide use.

[bmann]

You can find and replace a Character format in FrameMaker. If the Paragraph format has autonumbering you will have to manaully update that style with the new font.

Or here's a trick if you're the one importing the text with Trados. Trados creates an ORG file that is ASCII. This is the file that contains the paragraph style info. Open it in Notepad and find and replace "Arial" with "Arial Greek" etc. You might have to tweak it a bit and it gets more complicated with more fonts but "find and replace" is usually a lot easier than editing multiple styles in Frame, especially when dealing with many files.