Fonts Substitution Table

[Papabjoe]

I'm having a real problem with fonts. I have several users in my solution, as well as one or two people helping me with programing. I have made some specific choices about fonts in my layouts, but with so many different people accessing the database, those decisions have been fruitless.

Does anyone know of a plugin, or a way of creating a pseudo-font substitution table similar to what you see in programs like quark xpress and other desktop publishing applications. I need something to run at startup that alerts the user that the solution is using fonts that are not loaded on their workstation. I need the user to have the ability to load those fonts, or substitute them with similar fonts before filemaker makes it's own changes and then forgets what the original font was.

This has become a critical problem for me. In my situation I have to redesign existing forms so that they look identical to each other. With fonts being switched all the time, this becomes an impossibility.

[Chuck]

I can think of two options.

I simply use fonts that are almost guaranteed to be on the user's computer. My preferred font is Verdana, although I've used Ariel as well on occassion.

But this does limit the design of your solution. If by design, you are referring to the non-field objects (labels, help text, etc.), you can convert the text to an image and insert the image into the layout. Then the user won't need to have the font you used. However, this will increase the size of your files, although the increase may be insignificant in comparison to the data that the files store.

Chuck

[Papabjoe]

From a marketing standpoint, if your designing a solution for a client that is sensitive to corporate identity, this is viewed as a major flaw. But from my standpoint, I'm designing forms based on irs forms. If I create non-design elements that need to be helvetica bold, but instead it substitutes arial bold, this will throw things off that are very critical. Each font has different kerning and tracking values. It's similar to the problems people would have when they created a word doc and then emailed it to someone else for editing. The second user would open the file and essentially re-flow the doc. This was one of the main reasons that pdf's became so popular. The pdf stores font and spacing values from within the file.