I've used custom fonts developed by my organization, originally in Fontographer and now Asia FontStudio (owned by FontLab, who also now owns Fontographer--being marketed as an entry-level product), and want to say it's a very slippery slope. One one hand, the custom fonts make it really easy for the writers to place inline graphics in their documents, and as long as they have been properly authored, they work great with our printers. We've been doing this for about 18 years, and it is really a great solution for print/PDF oriented content. We like the solution so much that we have developed almost 250 of these custom fonts.
The slippery slope factor comes in when you: 1. Have to deal with the huge quantity of fonts you have to install in your system, bogging it down and making a naturally unstable environment (Windows) even more unstable. 2. Have to manage all these custom fonts in a structured publishing environment (like Structured FrameMaker)where each new font requires editing of the DTD and EDD. 3. Need to repurpose your content for HTML or other like formats. Custom (vector) fonts don't work in a rasterized online world. You need to find a way to substitute back in either a vector-based graphic which can be auto-scaled in products like ePublisher or even FrameMaker's very flawed Save-As-HTML function, or substitute a raster file (JPEG) for each occurrence of a custom font character. We are looking at several very expensive solutions to permit us to offer HTML and similar deliverables (you don't want to know what we do and how much we currently spend to convert a document to HTML). Larry Grinnell 954.723.8914 ------------------------------------- Message: 27 Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:13:03 -0700 From: "Matt Sullivan" <m...@grafixtraining.com> Subject: RE: Reference graphic to Character format To: "'Robert Rogge'" <robertwrogge at gmail.com>, "'Framer's List'" <framers at lists.frameusers.com> Message-ID: <20080912211302.CA9311CAC147 at smtp-b.omnis.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" A common solution would be to create a font (Fontographer, etc.) that contains your graphics assigned to individual characters. Use the appropriate letter, apply the character format, and you are done. (assuming you can output the font wherever needed...) -Matt Sullivan GRAFIX Training, Inc. 714 960 6840