Extended character set pdf from Framemaker

Forum|Forum|2 days ago
April 30, 2026
3 replies
37 views

I’ve had an ongoing problem with FrameMaker 2022: When I save to pdf, it looks fine except for any Gujarati text (or any extended character set text), which comes out with the character spacing all wrong. I’ve asked tech support to help me solve it a dozen times, with no success.

I finally figured it out. I installed the HP Universal Postscript driver. Used that to print to a .prn file, then opened the .prn in Distiller to generate the pdf. It works perfectly, and it’s ten times faster than “save as pdf” or “print to pdf.”

Bob_Niland

Community Expert

Some font things to check off:
☑ All code points at or below U+FFFF
(i.e., in BMP if Unicode)
☐ Is this using the Unicode Gujarati block
(codepoints U+0A81…U+0AD0) or
a legacy overlay ISCII font
(codepoints \xA1-\xF0)?
☐ What is the font (name, foundry)?
☐ Is it TTF, Type1, OTF or other?
☐ If OTF, is it a static instances font
(not a Variable font)

The Postscript driver situation is interesting. I would expect the Adobe PDF instance to be the most reliable, but it has a tendency to mysteriously vanish, and did on my machine at some point in the recent past. Restoring it is a bit of a nuisance.

A

Allen Jack ArmstrongAuthor

Inspiring

Good morning, Bob. And thanks. But yes, we tried a number of fonts, including Arial Unicode and Adobe Gujarati. We had the same bad results with all of them.

But as I say, the HP driver worked like a charm.

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

What was the actual Gujarati font that you were using?

frameexpert

Community Expert

The downside is that you may not get bookmarks in your PDF and links from FrameMaker may not work. Make sure you test these.

www.frameexpert.com

A

Allen Jack ArmstrongAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks. And good morning. Fortunately, I don’t use bookmarks or links. My work is all prepress.

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

When you printed to PDF, were you using the Adobe PDF printer instance? If you did Save as PDF, that’s the same engine that’s used in the Publish to PDF route. Within that Publish route, you can tell it to use the older Distiller engine instead of the new one.

A

Allen Jack ArmstrongAuthor

Inspiring

Thank you, Jeff. Believe me, I tried it every way. The Adobe tech team talked me through a dozen scenarios. At least.

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

That’s pretty weird - were you embedding the font with your joboptions file?

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded