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Carlo Fontanesi
Known Participant
August 2, 2010
Question

From FM to pdf, font problem

  • August 2, 2010
  • 4 replies
  • 1623 views

I don't know if this problem regards FM o r distiller... anyway:

I have to print som Czech and Slovak document on pdf, form FM 7.

I have Windows 7 with Acrobat (and Distiller) 9

Documents use Helvetica CE font.

All is good except two (!) characters:  ť and its case Ť; the first seems to be impossible to write on FM 7 so I use a t with a very near '.

The second (alt + 0141) appears good on FM, but disappears on the pdf.

It is printed good if I use Arial CE.

Know I'm going to change all the font for only that character, but if somebody have some suggestion, I will appreciate!

Thanks

P.S. I also tried to print from FM 9, but it doesn't work too.

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    4 replies

    Michael_Müller-Hillebrand-ztkn
    Participating Frequently
    August 2, 2010

    Carlo,

    As you already guessed: it is a font problem. Arial is not beautiful but from a technical point of view the "gold standard" of fonts. If it works with Arial but not with a certain other font, the "other font" has a problem.

    Most probably you have a hard-coded font "Helvetica CE" on your system, visible in the font folder. "Arial CE" is a virtual font, not available in the font folder, a subset created by Windows for older software that can not handle Unicode encoding. Arial has all those Eastern European characters at the correct Unicode positions and the virtual font technology maps them in the range older applications can understand.

    In addition to that, pre-Unicode FrameMaker on Windows always had two "blind spots", one for the Polish Ź (Zacute) and the other one for the Czech/Slovakian ť (tcaron). This was because of the Macintosh compatibility, the Mac OS had characters at those positions that were not Windows-compatible. With the latest patch release of FrameMaker 7.2p158 (April 2006) those blind spots were "opened" and FrameMaker could use/print those characters if the font provided them accordingly.

    Your problem with FrameMaker 9 is most probably due to the problem with Helvetica CE. If you had access to a full-fledged Helvetica with all necessary glyphs, you could use all those characters. I once listed several methods how to enter arbitrary Unicode characters into FrameMaker 8 and 9, always assuming the current font supports this character [in German]: http://cap-studio.de/wp/index.php/info/framemaker/unicode-zeichen-eingeben/

    HTH,

    - Michael

    Carlo FontanesiAuthor
    Known Participant
    August 2, 2010

    Thanks Michael,

    this is a good answer...

    I'll study your page and look why my Helvetica CE is not complete.

    Art Campbell
    Inspiring
    August 2, 2010

    FM 7 doesn't support unicode characters, which include the ones you're trying to print, but FM 9 does.

    However, if you entered a FM 7 character code and then open the file in FM 9, the old code is still in place.

    I'd try opening a new file in FM 9, inserting the required characters, and seeing if that PDFs OK.

    If it does, open the FM 7 file and convert your character string to the real character code....

    ***

    There may also be font problems involved on your system, but setting up the file properly would be the first step in trouble shooting.

    Cheers,

    Art

    Carlo FontanesiAuthor
    Known Participant
    August 2, 2010

    Thanks Art!

    I know about Unicode and FM7, but here seems to be a problem with Helvetica CE (and Helvetica EE too):

    for the first character (t') I agreed with you: it's a Unicode character that FM7 can't "see".

    For the other one (Ť) the problem is that FM can "draw" it (so it isn't seem to be a Unicode character), but it prints it only if I use Arial CE ot Times New Roman CE, ... that, I presume, use the font map part for Central European languages... as also Helvetica CE should uses.

    For now I resolved searching all that character and replacing Helvetica CE with Arial CE, that is quite similar...

    Otherwise working on pdf it's possible to re-write that character, but it's too time consuming.

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