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WritingSolutions2020
Participant
April 19, 2011
Question

FrameMaker 9 on Windows 7 64-bit — Font garbling and other problems?

  • April 19, 2011
  • 1 reply
  • 1429 views

FrameMaker 9.0 p255 (fully patched),  Acrobat Distiller 9 fully patched, Windows 7 64-bit fully patched.

- In FrameMaker 9, using the Save As PDF option sometimes produces PDFs with garbled text.

- Re-saving as PDF may correct the problem, or it may cause the originally garbled text to generate correctly but garble some other portion of the PDF output.

- On other occasions, FrameMaker will generate the PDF correctly.

- I've tried saving the documents as MIF and bringing them back into FM 9 but can't tell for sure if this is actually fixing the problem.

- My general operating procedure has been to run FM9 with Windows Administrator privileges.  (Seems to work better overall, although I must say I am definitely NOT imnpressed with FM9, at least under Windows 7 64-bit…)

Can anyone please advise whether the font garbililng issue is a known one, and if so what the fix or circumvention might be?

(I notice that in general, FM 9 on my W7 64-bit computer is overall a bit "flaky", prone to lock ups, hiccups, and a variety of inconsistent behaviors.  This is in marked contrast to my old FM8 on XP computer that was rock solid.)

Cheers & thanks for your help,

Riley

P.S. I was at one time a very heavy FrameMaker "power user", but haven't used version 9 very much (since I discovered Madcap Flare).  Similarly, I once tracked these forums on a regular basis, and so would be on top of this sort of issue, but this is my first visit in more than a year.  Finally, I tried the forum's search feature but it didn't return useful posts.  Thx, R

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    1 reply

    A
    Anonymous
    April 19, 2011

    R, some troubleshooting questions:

    What types of fonts are you using, PS Type 1, TT, OTF, etc.

    Do the garbled bits correspond to font changes of any sort or to bold / italic whatever? If so, are the changes applied as text overrides or are they character formats?

    Do your docs have content that was imported from some other app, or was it all entered into FM directly? Text insets from other apps?

    Is Adobe PDF set as your default printer when working in FM? Do you occasionally swap to other printers?

    Could you post a screencap of the garbling?

    Sheila (ps -- welcome back, your voice and participation is well remembered)

    W
    WritingSolutions2020Author
    Participant
    April 19, 2011

    Thanks for your response; and kind words.

    I'd send a screenshot but I seem to have fixed the problem, at least for now. Wish I knew for sure whether the ol' Save as MIF trick was the fix or not.

    As such, my submission is now more of a preventive measure.  That is, I can catch this problem in a three-page document pretty readily, but if this is a known issue, and I start gen'ing big documents (FrameMaker's putative strength, as I recall), it's going to be very inefficient to proofread each and every gen'ed instance of a 100+ page PDF for occurrences of random text garbling…

    Anyhow, the specific font was Bookman Old Style. As best I can tell, it's a legitimate TrueType font that comes with W7.

    This was an FM8 document (my resume, actually) that I opened and saved in FM9. No other trickery. The garbling is a replacement of one or more Bookman bearing paragraph instances (body, bulleted list) with nonsense characters, producing gibberish.

    The Adobe PDF printer is my default printer, and in fact this laptop's only printer at the moment. (I'll note in passing that all my PDFs look *terrible* relative to how they looked on my older, presumably "less advanced", FM8 / XP setup…)

    So the key point is that if is this isn't a known issue, then I'll set it aside for now and come back to it if it recurs, at which point I can provide a picture or two of the damage…

    ------
    Thanks again for the kind welcome back, but I'm not sure how regularly I'll be on the FM Forums going forward. I confess I've become a big fan of MadCap Flare, to the extent that I recommend it to any new tech writing customers. Assuming they accept my recommendation (so far all of them have), I am then happy to use Flare as my primary authoring tool. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but Madcap the company and Flare the product have made a very favorable impression on me relative to certain other, older companies and products.  Even Madcap's user forum is several times easier to use…)

    Cheers, thanks 'gain, & take care,
    Riley
    SFO

    A
    Anonymous
    April 19, 2011

    Bookman Old Style doesn't seem to be a Win7-supplied font:

    http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/font.aspx?FMID=188

    http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fonts/product.aspx?PID=161

    Could be that your Distiller font locations list doesn't have the path to wherever Bookman is located, but then it would likely be completely failed rather than just patchy garbled.

    Did you happen to reboot between problem and apparent fix?

    I don't recall anybody reporting a problem with Bookman, or about random garbled sections of any font, for that matter.

    Completely understood about shifting focus, when an app "clicks" it's always best to listen to the gut, isn't it? I remember the "aha" moment once I'd tried Frame (excruciatingly many moons ago), I never could bear to use Ventura again.

    Sheila

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