Re: cleaning out old fonts

[Rhea Tolman <rtolman@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Deborah, thanks for the advice. Unfortunately, I've had "Remember
Missing Fonts" unchecked for some time. That gets rid of
everything except old fonts in tables. You sound like you really
know your stuff. Got any other ideas?

I've also followed Jay Smith's advice (thank you Jay!): I've
double-checked that the old, unused tags that have the unwanted
fonts REALLY don't exist anywhere in the doc--Body, Reference, or
Master pages. Then I've re-created the four or five old tags that
turn up in the MIF with the old fonts but I've re-created them
using current fonts and definitions and done Update All. Looking
in the MIF, I found that those tags STILL had the old fonts.

All occurrences of these tags/fonts are in tables. As far as I can
tell, they're being used to create "ghost" columns. I've got
three-column tables that have 8 or more columns defined in the
MIF! And the ghost columns have, of course, the ghost tags and
ghost fonts. I'm feeling pretty haunted 'long about now. 

These ancient tags and fonts seem to be locked away in parts of
the table that don't really exist. I'm pretty good with
FrameMaker, I've used it for years and I like it a lot. And
generally I have a fairly good time solving problems. But this one
has really got me. I'm trying to clean up the templates and doc
set so that we can distribute them to contractors and outsources.
I'm almost there. All I have to do is bust the ghosts.

Thanks to all...

Rhea
Lead Technical Writer, InterBase Software Corp.


"Snavely, Deborah" wrote:
> 
> Rhea,
> 
> >What to do? I can't search for either the tags or the fonts in the
> >native FrameMaker file, because they're not accessible in that
> >form. The MIF file is intricate, and I'm not at all confident that
> >I could remove the unwanted font calls without munging the file.
> >And, there are a LOT of them. These are old docs. They've been
> >around.
> >
> >FWIW, I'm using FrameMaker 5.5.2 on NT4 with Adobe Type Manager
> >Deluxe. I think that the docs have always been on Wintel
> >platforms.
> 
> On any version of Frame (4.0 and up for Mac, 5.5 and up for Windows) that
> offers the "Remember Missing Fonts" preference, you can quickly remove any
> truly unused font names with the following simple procedure (per file, but
> it's fairly quick):
> 
> 1. With the file closed/ open Frame Preferences and un-check Remember
> Missing Fonts.
> 2. Open the file or files you want to clean up, respond to the dialog box
> about missing fonts, then save and close the file/s.
> 3. Open the file/s a second time to check that you do NOT get the missing
> fonts dialog again.
> 4. When you're done with all files (or for the day, I don't recommend
> leaving Frame Prefs set this way for any length of time), open Prefs and
> check Remember Missing Fonts.
> 
> As always, do one or two test files to make sure this procedure does what
> you want. Note that uncataloged paragraphs or characters on reference and
> master pages may contain fonts not in your current styles but could cause
> some past-style fonts (ghosts, I call 'em) to remain in your document.
> Cleaning up document templates to delete such ghosts is a fine art, and an
> action I recommend whenever you make major style changes to dept/corporate
> docs (you're using templates, yes?). Once ghost fonts and other elements are
> gone, there are two or three fairly clean ways to apply the new styles to
> older documents being revised or updated. For new docs, it's almost always
> easiest to clone a blank template or boilerplate (based on the current
> template) and assemble docs from there.
> 
> Good luck!
> 
> Deborah Snavely
> Senior Technical Writer
> consulting at Visa
> standard disclaimers apply
> 
> ** To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@omsys.com **
> ** with "unsubscribe framers" (no quotes) in the body.   **

** To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@omsys.com **
** with "unsubscribe framers" (no quotes) in the body.   **