Legend

Question

Text missing from PDF

Forum|Forum|19 years ago
July 28, 2006
102 replies
63808 views

I am a long-time and very experienced user of FrameMaker, Acrobat, and all associated tools. My XP-SP2 system is thoroughly debugged and fully updated.

When I create PDFs in Frame, sections of the text come up missing. The document remains correctly formatted and organized - there are simply missing sentences, paragraphs, etc. in no discernible pattern. I have tried every fix I can think of and all those I have found by searching online - to no avail.

These documents are created from scratch in Frame 7.2p158; I have updated the installation at least once without solving the problem. The PDFs are being created by every known process: print to Distiller (7.0) within Frame; Save As PDF; print to generic PostScript and pass to Distiller. The missing text remains consistent within all processes.

The fonts involved range from junk of unknown origin to (most of my fonts) true Adobe Postscript. Changing fonts does not cure the problem, although it sometimes changes which parts disappear. There is no particularly complex formatting involved (no equations, no unusual character overrides). These documents are mostly contracts and other simple but rigidly formatted documents. None involve imported graphics.

I have tried all variations of saving to MIF and RTF and re-importing. This sometimes changes the faults, but does not cure them.

This problem occurs ONLY with FrameMaker. I can export perfect PDFs, some from very complex source documents, from Word, InDesign, CorelDRAW and a dozen other tools, using any fonts on my system.

(I am dismayed at how hard Adobe support has gotten to use - as the owner of nine of their most expensive apps, I should be able to get better online support without calling in and begging permission!)

If anyone can point me to a known bug, a known fix, or a good starting point for unraveling this problem - or confirm that they've seen a similar error - I would appreciate it!

PDF output

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_sherman_watstein_

Participating Frequently

Suggest that he next time you have a project, avoid using the generic PS driver that MS allows. Even if you do not have a PS printer, get the software for installing what ever printer from the mfg's web site. It does make a difference both in the PDF color output and it corrects other problems that come up. If you have distiller, the Adobe PDF printer will work.

H

Helge Blischke

Participating Frequently

What I experienced recently (independent of the printer driver software , on both NT4 (with the kernel mode printing system) and XP (with the user mode running stuff)) is that, whenever using TrueType fonts which are downloaded incrementally, it happens that the initial part of the font program (the part containig the Type42 interpreter) is downloaded more than once, which causes the set of glyphs of the previously loaded instances get undefined (i.e. replaced by .notdef) and thus appearing as white space.

I suspect that this is an issue of the Windows GDI, as I never encountered this bug with applacations which generate their own PostScript code, like InDesign.

Helge

James Gifford—NitroPressAuthor

Legend

Thanks for the comments, Sherman. I recall that the way I got the first problem doc to print was by printing to a generic PS driver and passing it to Distiller. I installed a generic driver (one of the Xerox DocuColor ones, which I recall having good results from in the make-a-PS days) and it worked... although I had to re-output one page separately.

Better than nothing, it got my agreement off to the party who needs it, and now I get to add my voice to those clamoring for Adobe to fix the real problem here... :P

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_sherman_watstein_

Participating Frequently

All I can offer is a related experience-- I have a 300 page document that would print OK when I printed from FraeMaker, However when I generated a PostScript file and then generated a PDF, I ended up with missing text. Missing means that on a page I would have some text but not what I started with. I fund out that the problem was in the set-up of the postscript printer. Im my case I have Windows 2000 and it allows me to select a printer from the printer list and depending on what printers you have used, may or may not require you to need the Windows CD. What turned out to be the cause of the mising text was the I didn't use the CD or down-load of the printer files needed to install the printer. The second think that was important was that I embedded the fonts used in FrameMaker in Distiller. In my cae these were Type-1 fonts. Once these two things were corrected the missing text no longer occured. Although a lot of people on the forum believe that the only way to generate a PDF is using the Adobe PDF printer, Adobe tech support and the help files will tell you otherwise. Any PostScript printer will work if setup using the printers's installtion software and the one used has the resolution you need (note- you don't need to have a PS printer available to setup a PS printer, no one has an Adobe PDF printer, there is no such printer ever made by Adove). Both the Adobe PDF printer and the PS printer can create a PDF file (PS does require two setps). The resulting PDF is the same. The one thing that the Adobe PDF printer can do is allow you to set the page size to custom (not limited to pater try size of PS printer). And last never stop the generating of a PS file from a book by clicking the "Cancel" button, doing so crashed a Windows NT and 2000 system.

A

Art Campbell

Inspiring

Dov, or any other Adobe people listening in ....

I think there are more than enough people who would be happy to provide sample documents for testing. ;- ) This is not a rare bug; it's depressingly common.

Just as a PS... another work around I've found that works for me is to use my Xerox PS driver to print a ps file and then distill that. May work with other PS drivers too.

Cheers,
Art

James Gifford—NitroPressAuthor

Legend

Thanks, all. A working workaround is better than nothing... but not as good as a fix.

I wish Adobe would stop treating Frame like an unwanted stepchild. What is it with high-powered text-focused page layout apps that lead to their being kept in the closet under the stairs by their owners - Ventura, Sprint, Manuscript and now FrameMaker. *Sigh*. I've come to like InDesign a great deal for shorter work, but it's still not a very capable long-doc or simple-doc tool.

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_Rebecca_Officer_

Participating Frequently

Dov Isaac's take on it about 18 months ago was that they couldn't reproduce the bug but were trying. I agree with you that it's crazy it's been around so long. At least now that tech note documents the fix!

You shouldn't need to change anything but the settings Arnis described. They affect the granularity of text placement (nothing to do with graphics), and general feeling was that 300 dpi has no visible effect for almost everyone. Lower than that might. Others may have more info than I do on that.

Cheers, Rebecca

James Gifford—NitroPressAuthor

Legend

Well, I went to extremes and set all the driver dpi's to 150, and the PDF print resolution to 300.

Solved the problem. For the current doc, anyway; it still crashes the other.

Minor rant: how could this happen with an Adobe app updated to latest spec, printing with Adobe fonts to Adobe PDF (with Acrobat updated to latest specs), on a very "clean" system with fully updated XP and beaucoup resources (2GB RAM, 100's of GB of free disk space)? Huh. (Rant over.)

If I create and tweak a special Frame 7 PDF preset at 300 dpi all around, what am I giving up? Higher image res? It should not affect any vector components including type resolution, right?

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_Rebecca_Officer_

Participating Frequently

Make it 300 dpi instead of 600. 600 works for most people but we had to drop to 300 for the fix.

Cheers, Rebecca

James Gifford—NitroPressAuthor

Legend

Mike - I can try, but it tends to be only longer documents (3-4 pages, so just whipping one up would be tedious) and most of my examples are confidential agreements and contracts. Wait - I probably have an event policy I can post. I'll check.

Arnis - I tried all of the suggestions in your post, and a few more. All of my print resolution settings were either 1200 or 600 dpi; I changed them to 600 across the board. (I should note that I tried a variety of standard and custom PDF settings, including "Smallest File Size," without solving the problem.) No solution.

I updated Acrobat to 7.0.8, one of the few updates not applied to my system. This changed the list of PDF standards from some odd-looking ones that never seemed right to the more usual v4-5-6-7 choices. I'm beginning to wonder if I should totally uninstall all Acrobat files, and perhaps Frame, and do a clean install. (Urgh... this is a relatively new, clean system build overall, done when I updated my entire Adobe suite in February.)

The problem, as nearly as I can tell, lies entirely with Frame. I do some very large and complex PDF output from InDesign and the only problems are ones I create myself. :)

Further ideas much appreciated. I will check for a broken file I can post.

ADDENDUM: I opened one of the first documents I had trouble with, one I finally beat into PDF form but do not recall exactly how (print to a generic PS driver and pass to Distiller, I think.) On attempting to print, I got a Frame internal error: 7204, 6109922 7778420 0. It will not print to PDF. It prints fine to HP PS and PCL.

Then I opened an old but reliable Frame 5 file, a short chapter from a book with some complex formatting (professional references and end notes). Opened, printed... huge swaths of missing text.

Is Frame broken with respect to PDF?

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