TechNote (Archived)

Adding Fonts to FrameMaker 5 for UNIX

There are two ways to add fonts to FrameMaker 5:

- By installing them with the Adobe Type Installer (ATI).

- By converting Adobe Type 1 fonts from Mac or PC formats.

Installing Fonts Using ATI

Late in the development of FrameMaker 5, a new feature was added that makes adding fonts for use with FrameMaker much easier. This information is in the online Release Notes.

Here is an excerpt from the online Release Notes, pages 4-5:

Adobe Type Installer (UNIX only)

Fonts installed with the Adobe Type Installer for UNIX are automatically recognized and fully supported by UNIX Frame products. You can use ATI to install fonts into either /usr/psres or $HOME/psres or both. However, if you install fonts into /usr/psres on one machine, they must be mounted as /usr/psres on all machines that refer to them. (Unlike when you perform a Frame font installation, you cannot use ATI to install a font in one directory on a server and mount it in a directory with another name on client machines.) Also note that you must use ATI to install fonts to have them work with Frame products; simply renaming them or copying them into /usr/psres will not work. For more information, see the ATI documentation.

If fonts installed with the Adobe Type Installer (ATI) for UNIX are not automatically downloaded when you print, ask your system administrator to install the latest Transcript spooling software from Adobe.

It is not necessary to modify any of the files in the FrameMaker 5 installation.

Important: You will not be able to access any of the fonts in the /usr/psres directory if you have a custom FrameMaker 4 fontlist file in the following directories:

./fminit/fontdir (where . is the directory from which you started maker) ~/fminit/fontdir

If you want a custom fontlist file, you need to copy the one from the FrameMaker 5 installation ($FMHOME/fminit/fontdir/fontlist) and place it in either of the above two directories. Then you can modify it.

Note: ATI itself runs only under Solaris. But the fonts it installs can be used by FrameMaker on SunOS (and on other UNIX platforms that FrameMaker supports). You can either mount the resulting /usr/psres from the Solaris machine on the SunOS machine, or you can use ATI running on Solaris to install fonts across the network onto a SunOS machine directly.

ATI installs the fonts included with Adobe Font Folio. For more information about Font Folio, contact your Adobe distributor or visit the Adobe Web site at www.adobe.com/products/fontfolio/main.html.

Converting Adobe Type 1 Fonts

The instructions for this procedure are in the online manual, Managing Frame Products. The important thing to remember is that it is not necessary to upload the bitmapped fonts and convert them to .bfont files. However, you do need to make some new modifications to the fontlist file. The following is from page 26 of Managing Frame Products:

Frame products use bitmapped fonts to display text on your computer screen. If a bitmapped font size matches a font size specified for text in a document, the bitmapped font is used (the screen font sizes shipped are 10, 12, 14, 18, and 24 points). If a different font size is specified, such as 8 or 11 points, outline fonts are used to scale the font so that its appearance is correct on the screen.

An ATM statement must exist in your fontlist file to show the location of your outline fonts. For more information, see "Describing PostScript Type 1 fonts" on page 60.