Is it possible to remove unseen font references from an .fm file?

Question

We have used a Framemaker book template that was created about 15 years ago to create technical manuals. We've modified this template many times. It's pretty complex, but the main purpose is to keep the appearance, structure, etc., consistent among mulitiple writers. It works well.
We originally used Times and Helvetica as the primary fonts. Now we're using other fonts. It was a tedious job to replace all the instances of Times and Helvetica in the Paragraph and Character designers.
Here's the problem:
Theoretically, these fonts should be gone.
But if I open the template files, even with no content, I get this message in the Frame Console:
xxx Font is not available.               (where xxx is Helvetica or Times or variants)
zzz will be used in this session.
I didn't see this problem until today, because my computer was just reimaged by IT and so I no longer have these (Postscript) fonts installed. Frame thinks these fonts are still used in the various .fm chapters. But, it should not need them.
I got to thinking about how old our template is and so I "examined" one of the template files, chapter.fm. I renamed the file chapter.txt and was able to open in with Notepad. I found about 40 references to Helvetica buried in Frame's code (some of it "machine language"). This was certainly revealing. My real question is, is there anyway to purge the files of these font references? The file structure is totally complex and I would not think of editing these files. I'm sure this would not work, and Adobe would probably arrest me if I did.
Is there a MIF editor or similar that could do this?
I could reinstall these fonts as a workaround, but they're really not used and so I would rather purge the font references if I can.
Someone may say: Create a new template. If we did, we would want it to be the same as the one we have. It is complex enough that we just cannot take the time to do this. It would take days and days.
Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Bill,
Many years ago I had a similar problem. I solved it by saving the file to mif and then opening the mif file with NotePad or WordPad, then searching for instances of the old font. These usually appeared as a toggle on and a toggle off without any text between them. So, I deleted them and opened the mif file and saved back to fm. I did not take the opportunity to determine exactly where these instances were in the file. They can be anywhere..body pages, reference pages, master pages, etc.
NOTE that if you take the above route and then import your template into existing files, the instances in existing files will still be there because it cannot copy in something that does not exist.
When you say, "This will blow away the old references," do you think it would get rid of the numerous references that are unseen in the .fm file (unless you look at it in Notepad)?
No, the references are still there, but you have changed them to a different font, one that is on your system. Arnis' point is that this is a simple way to get rid of the console messages because the assumption is that such font references do not display in your document so are likely inocuous.
Van