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graphic from Corel Designer X6 pasted into FrameMaker 9 character combinations "fi" and "fl" get converted to "?" (all without quotes).

Forum|Forum|10 years ago
June 10, 2015
3 replies
1201 views

Copied a graphic from Corel Designer X6 and pasted into FrameMaker 9 doc. All instances of character combinations "fi" and "fl" get converted to "?" (all without quotes). Tried changing font from the default Helvetica to several others including Tahoma and Arial, with same results. Pasting graphic into Word does not suffer same problem. What is wrong with FrameMaker???

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Correct answer Bob_Niland

Helvetica is a legacy codepage 1252 font, and has no ligatures, other than Æ, æ, and arguably ¼, ½, and ¾.

Windows 7 (in CharacterMap) appears to be faking Œ and œ at code points \u0152 and \u0153, as well as ﬁ and ﬂ at \ufb01 and \ufb02, which code points cannot exist in a CP1252 font. FM may or may not be able to see these synthetic unichars, depending on the FM version and OS.

What appears to have happened here is that the originating app was using the Unicode code points, for example, \ufb01 for "fi". That app may have been doing a silent substitution from some other font for the visibly presented ﬁ & ﬂ, but in any case passed the Unicode values forward. Since Helvetica officially doesn't populate anything above \i00ff, FM throws a "?"

Some applications automatically convert certain character sequences to ligatures. That's either a benefit or a hazard. For portability, it's usually a hazard. Others may just try to fake it with tight metrics.

The newer Adobe Helvetica Neue is a Unicode font, and may well populate the ligatures, but since the name is not "Helvetica", just having it installed wouldn't automatically fix the problem.

There may or may not have existed some overlay fonts that were Helvetica mimics, and provided ligatures, possibly in the \x80 thru \xff range, but had that been the case, it's more likely that you'd have gotten some random Latin-1 Supplement glyph, rather than a "?".

Bob_Niland

Correct answer

Community Expert

Helvetica is a legacy codepage 1252 font, and has no ligatures, other than Æ, æ, and arguably ¼, ½, and ¾.

Windows 7 (in CharacterMap) appears to be faking Œ and œ at code points \u0152 and \u0153, as well as ﬁ and ﬂ at \ufb01 and \ufb02, which code points cannot exist in a CP1252 font. FM may or may not be able to see these synthetic unichars, depending on the FM version and OS.

What appears to have happened here is that the originating app was using the Unicode code points, for example, \ufb01 for "fi". That app may have been doing a silent substitution from some other font for the visibly presented ﬁ & ﬂ, but in any case passed the Unicode values forward. Since Helvetica officially doesn't populate anything above \i00ff, FM throws a "?"

Some applications automatically convert certain character sequences to ligatures. That's either a benefit or a hazard. For portability, it's usually a hazard. Others may just try to fake it with tight metrics.

The newer Adobe Helvetica Neue is a Unicode font, and may well populate the ligatures, but since the name is not "Helvetica", just having it installed wouldn't automatically fix the problem.

There may or may not have existed some overlay fonts that were Helvetica mimics, and provided ligatures, possibly in the \x80 thru \xff range, but had that been the case, it's more likely that you'd have gotten some random Latin-1 Supplement glyph, rather than a "?".

Arnis Gubins

Inspiring

It sounds like the charcters were set as ligatures in Corel, but you either don't have the same font in FM or the ligatures used in Corel don't correspond to a proper unicode point in FM.

It's best to save as an EPS or PDF from Corel products and embed the font. Then import by reference into FM. This has worked for me for the past twenty some years.

K

KevinKroftAuthor

Participating Frequently

Arnis, Thanks for the quick reply!

The text isn't ligatures; all text is just text. The graphic is vector

line art with text callouts. Here's a screen shot.

All text is Helvetica font. Tried several others but every time, the fi or

fl becomes ?.

For 20+ years we've used the technique where we copy the image in Designer

and paste into PageMaker. Now we are converting to FrameMaker.

We use the technical terms configure and configuration very often in our

product documentation. Rewriting for this character swap problem will

suck.

Kevin

[Contact information deleted by moderator]

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

What’s the format of the graphic? I’ve never heard of an image of text being messed about with in FM. It sounds like you’ve copied in text, not a graphic.

K

KevinKroftAuthor

Participating Frequently

Jeff, thanks for the quick reply.

It's not an image of text. The graphic is vector line art with text

callouts. Here's a screen shot.

All text is Helvetica font. Tried several others but every time, the fi or

fl becomes ?.

For 20+ years we've used the technique where we copy the image in Designer

and paste into PageMaker. Now we are converting to FrameMaker.

We use the technical terms configure and configuration very often in our

product documentation. Rewriting for this character swap problem will

suck.

Kevin

[Contact information deleted by moderator]

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

They get stripped off when responding by e-mail; I’d take Arnis’ advice and bring them in by reference. Do you have any translation (localization) going on? If so, I’ve heard (I don’t need to do it myself at this point) that the best practices are to keep your text and graphics separate so that callouts can be translated without having to redo the entire picture.

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