SUMMARY: Problems with FM on Windows 2000?

["Thomas Michanek" <thomas.michanek@xxxxxx>]

Some weeks ago, I asked a number of framers about possible
problems running FrameMaker on Windows 2000, in particular FM 6.
(This does NOT address migration problems from FM 5.x to 6.0.)

Better late than never, this is a summary of the responses.
(Feel free to forward this summary to the FrameUsers list.)
I run FM 5.5.6 on Windows 2000 myself and I've tried out FM 6,
but I haven't made the switch yet.

First of all, you must run FM version 5.5.6 or later. Using
earlier versions results in a number of font/encoding problems.
Second, you need to install FM, drivers, Acrobat, etc. in the
correct way: refer to the framers posting from June 08, 2001
by Dov Isaacs entitled "RE: Giant PDF File - Why?".

Jim Leininger reported a problem often described by Dov Isaacs:
> The only problems I have run into with Frame 6.0 and Windows 2000
> occurred when the machine in question was upgraded to Win2k as
> opposed to being a clean install. Since then all of our machines
> have been reformatted with clean installs of Win2k.

Tim Murray (and myself) noted the Zapf Dingbats problem:
> the only Frame-related problem I have is that Zapf Dingbats thing,
> which, for now, seems to be fixed (you saw the forum post, I take it?)

The problem is that the Zapf Dingbats font displays using the
Wingdings font, but prints correctly. The fix that Tim refers to can
be found in Adobe's User-to-user forum for FrameMaker, in the topic
"Patch for Zapf Dingbats problem", posted 20 April 2001.
(Unfortunately, the forum is once again inaccessible, so I cannot
provide a link...)

Tim, Arnis Gubins and others have reported a number of subtle font
oddities on Windows 2000. Dov Isaacs says that you must have the
TrueType version of Symbol installed on Windows 2000, and you should
avoid having the Type 1 Symbol font installed too.

Viktor Haag said:
> The only problem I had was with cross-platform font handling.
> Our font handling problem was fixed by judicious editing of the
> maker.ini file...

David Hayes reported a general Windows font problem:
> For all versions of FrameMaker (AFAIK) in the maker.ini file, in
> the [WindowsToFrameFontAliases] section, the wildcards (*) only
> seem to work reliably on Windows 95. For other versions of Windows
> you have to use an explicit font alias entry for each font variation,
> or else you can get nasty pop-up messages about missing fonts

Roger Sharp said:
> FrameMaker 6.0 regenerates the screen slower when I have imported
> photos into a document "by reference." The photos reside in a
> different directory on our company intranet. The problem goes away
> when I import "by copying."

Ricardo Rodriguez reported a similar problem:
> Problems where related with windows-switch refresh speed: when
> I'm working at a documet and change to another window within the
> same FM session, the refresh time was too long

In general, the problems were considered minor and didn't stop
people from upgrading. The computers used ranged from Pentium II
233 MHz to Pentium III 933 MHz, with a recommended memory of 256 MB
(128 MB is a bare minimum for Windows 2000).

Finally, don't forget Shlomo Perets' list of FM bugs at:
http://www.microtype.com/resources/FMbugs.html


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Thomas Michanek, FrameMaker/UNIX/MIF expert
Technical writer, IAR Systems; Uppsala, Sweden
mailto:Thomas.Michanek@telia.com, or @iar.se
Web page: http://w1.184.telia.com/~u18407300/
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