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Fonts Mapping

The Mif2Go product does an efficient job of exporting the FrameMaker paragraph and character formats. It can change the formats as it converts.

For example, the serif fonts (such as Time New Roman or Palatino) have historic readability reasons that make them appropriate for body text intended for print. The serifs are the little horizontal marks at the tops and bottoms of letters. Over time and practice reading, the human eye is trained to look at the shapes of words rather than the individual letters within the word. The serifs provide more definitive shapes to words to facilitate their recognition.

However, monitor resolution of the serif’s as pixels can seriously degrade the readability when used online. The “chunky” nature of pixels makes the serifs more of a hindrance for recognizing word shapes. For this reason, sans-serif fonts (such as Ariel or Verdana) are often used more often for body text online. Verdana is the online font presently recommended by Microsoft for online documentation.

Aside from the font definitions inside of FrameMaker’s paragraph and character formats, fonts are defined in:

• The mif2htm.ini file.

• The cascading style sheet.

The main font items that the mif2htm.ini file defines are re-mapping of print fonts to online fonts.

[Fonts]
Palatino=Verdana
GillSans=Times New Roman
AvantGarde=Verdana
GillSans Light=Times New Roman
Times=Times New Roman
Helvetica=Arial
Courier=Courier New
HelveticaNarrow=Arial Narrow
Helvetica-Narrow=Arial Narrow
Century Schoolbook=NewCenturySchlbk
Common Bullets=CommonBullets

The Voyant corporate style guide for printed documentation recommends:

• GillSans (sans-serif) for titles and headings.

• Palatino (serif) for body text.

However, online user’s of Voyant’s documentation cannot be expected to have GillSans or Palatino. Moreover, Voyant’s use of serif and sans-serifs fonts could be troubling when read from a monitor. The mif2htm.ini file maps (serif) Palatino to the sans-serif Verdana font and the (sans-serif) GillsSans to the serif Times New Roman font.

In addition, Mif2Go is used to create the first cascading style sheet (CSS). Mif2Go creates classes for all paragraph formats in the CSS giving these the same properties as the owning FrameMaker document unless mapped otherwise in the mif2htm.ini file.

The CSS is further modified by hand to achieve our desired online look-and-feel. An important change the we implement is the use of font-family. This means that our CSS definitions specify one or two fonts that their system probably has, like Verdana and Ariel. However, if those aren’t on the system, we specify “serif” or “sans-serif” and let the browser application locate an appropriate font.



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Open-Source tools compliments of Voyant Technologies, Inc. and Glenn C. Maxey.
01/13/2003

TP Tools v2-00-0a

# tpt-hug-02