Is there a way to create a standard hollow bullet?

Question

Hello everyone,
We are using FrameMaker 12 on a Windows 7 (64 bit) platform.
I have found discussions on the Web about this, but so far nothing works for us. As you know, other word processing tools have a hollow bullet as a standard feature. After spending a couple of hours over the past few months researching forums, it appears there is no way to get a true hollow bullet in FrameMaker. Is that correct?
This is what does *not* work for us:
A Courier or Courier New lower case letter "o" (oh). If we could raise it up off the line, it would work. There appears to be no way to lift a character a few pixels off the line.
The symbol you get by pressing Alt+9: ○. When this symbol appears in FrameMaker, it is also needs to be raised up off the line so it doesn't look like the letter "o."
The circular symbol you get when you type a lower case "m" and change the font to Windings 1, because it has shading on the lower right, and also would need to be raised up off the line.
We know how to make any Winding or Webding a bullet. What we want is the standard hollow bullet. Can anyone explain how to do that?
Thank you.
Tim

Answer 1

If what's needed is to redefine the default glyph generated by the FM markup "\b", I'm not aware of any way to do that.
But it's simple to edit Paragraph Formats for any bulleted forms, and specify what glyph to use. On FM8 or higher, I would avoid using the old codepage font method, and instead use Unicode. Either choose a body font that populates the codepoint for the glyph you want, or invoke one that does, just for the bullet (Arial Unicode MS if necessary).
In Format > Paragraph > Designer for the bulleted form, it's the Numbering tab. The most obvious markup would be:
\u25e6\t
Which is the Unicode WHITE BULLET and a tab.
Other candidate glyphs might include:
\u25cb
\u25ef
\u274d
\u29bf
\u2299
\u229a
\u233e
\u2a00
\uffee
or even a non-breaking space and combining circle:
\ \u20dd
(update: looks like FM9 doesn't know how to do combining circle - they end up as separate space and circle characters).
If your preferred body font doesn't populate the desired bullet code point, create a Character Format, named perhaps "Bullets", that is As-Is or blank for everything except Font Family, which would select a typeface that does populate the codepoints of interest. Then select that Character Format in the Paragraph Designer menu for your bulleted para formats.