The Empire Strikes Back
With FrameMaker 8 :). Check out this screenshot I made,
Not a trick or a hack, but native unicode (utf-8) support.
Fonts Ahoy
I was testing a FrameMaker issue the other day - which involved growing the fntcache.dat file.
The fntcache.dat is inside the \windows\system32 directory and according to a Microsoft engineer I talked to that file is a bitmap cache used by the GDI. The way it works is once a font in a particular size has been used its cached as a black and white image inside that file. This makes Windows a bit quicker in rasterizing fonts on screen.
We found when this file gets too big (I’m guessing around 2 megabytes) Frame starts dropping text in PDF output. It’s a rather annoying problem that we have known about for a while. There’s even a public document about this issue with some things that may or may not solve it.
So how do you make this file bigger? Add fonts to the system!
So how does the system work after adding all these fonts? Actually I can’t tell the difference too much. Some applications take a bit longer to load (enumerating all those fonts I suspect), but the machine doesn’t take any longer to boot and its not sluggish or anything. Computer is a 3 GHz P4 with 1 gig of ram.
After doing this I was able to reproduce the problem.
