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James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
July 28, 2006
Question

Text missing from PDF

  • 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!
This topic has been closed for replies.

102 replies

Inspiring
November 30, 2006
Nitro,
Can you take a peak into whatever \System32 has morphed into and see if fontcache.dat is still there?

Art
James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
November 30, 2006
I have an RC2 system, but after spending a lot of time installing my tool set on XP64, and then on RC1, and having to scrub to bare metal for each successive install... I've decided to wait until final release before I install my whole Abobe set again. But I will be an early adopter - I plan to pick up Vista Ultimate in bulk for all the systems under my purview as soon as it's released to retail in January. (I just lost an hour fixing a temperamental XP system that has too many post-fix things jammed into it, and I really look forward to better OS-level integration of all that stuff, no matter what new bugs it brings.)
Inspiring
November 30, 2006
On a new system with XP SP2, FM 7.2 and Acrobat 8, the bug is still present and the workaround is still working.

FNTCACHE size is hovering around 1.5... I've deleted a number of fonts, but the font size isn't decreasing as much as it should.

Anyone playing with Vista yet that can check out how it handles fonts?

Cheers,
Art
Known Participant
September 25, 2006
Hi Bernd,

So far I can confirm this 1.5 MB limit. I got the fntcache filesizes from 5 users:
A 3.762 KB
B 1.517 KB
C 1.525 KB
D 2.121 KB
E 4.115 KB

User B and C recognized the bug no more than two weeks ago.
User A, D and E have this bug for a long time already.

I'll try now to cure their system according your "specification".

Thanks a lot.

Best regards.
Norbert
Participating Frequently
September 21, 2006
Hi all,

this is a good moment to keep you all updated on the current progress. Yes, these T3-font definitions usually appear in corrupt PS files, and don't appear in the working versions of the same files.

News so far: I've got a kind of receipt that allows to cause and cure the bug. It works here, and it works for Adobe's support, too (this is good news, I think :-))

I just copy this from an e-mail I wrote earlier this day, maybe it helps some of you who are still searching:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
INFECTING a system with the 'missing text bug'

1. Install too many fonts (if possible, some CJK fonts):
FNTCACHE.DAT remains unchanged (until reboot), nothing happens

2. Reboot once
FNTCACHE.DAT is rewritten, but on first reboot it behaves as if this file was deleted beforehand... the bug still does NOT occur.

3. Reboot twice
Now the previously written FNTCACHE.DAT is used by the system for the first time. If the FNTCACHE.DAT is too large, the bug strikes.

CURING a system from the 'missing text bug'

1. Temporarily:
Delete FNTCACHE.DAT and reboot *once*. The file will be rewritten, but is not read by the system on first reboot. If you reboot again, the bug is back.

2. Completely:
Remove as many fonts as possible. In my case it was enough to uninstall most CJK fonts. Reboot once. If the fntcache.dat file size is below 1.5 MB, the bug won't happen again, no matter how often you reboot.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

I can't tell if the 'magic number' of 1.5 MB is an absolute value or depends on your hardware/system configuration. I'm using a P4/3.0 with 2 GB of RAM.

Bernd
James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
September 21, 2006
I removed all the CJK fonts from my system and deleted FNTCACHE.DAT.
I have not had a recurrence of the missing-text problem since, even after quite a bit of work time with formerly problematic documents and a number of system restarts.
Known Participant
September 21, 2006
Our company and our customers are plagued by this BUG for years.

At least I found a method to identify erroneous PS files, when this BUG occurred first time in our company June 2003.
All erroneous PS files have this resource loaded (which may correspond to Helges Type3 font suspicious):

%%BeginResource: file Pscript_T3Hdr 5.0 0

Since then we scan our PS files for this "Pscript_T3Hdr"-occurrence automatically after printing. When such a PS is identified we ask the user to repeat the printing, which in 95% results in a proper PS printing one more time again.
But reflecting, ... printing again with success seems to differ from your BUG reports, isn't it?

As soon as one of our (alerted) user (I never experienced this BUG) reports an erroneous PS, I'll check Bernds method removing FNTCACHE.DAT and removing this BUG permanently.
Thank you Bernd and all others.

Best regards
Norbert
Inspiring
September 8, 2006
Bernd,

That's what I was thinking too, that's why I added the disclaimer about not being sure it was the same thing. I haven't trested it after deleting the cache though -- if I have a few minutes I'll try it just to see if there's any affect.

Art
Participating Frequently
September 8, 2006
Art,

this sounds more like the system having problems with ZapfDingbats or WingDings... there have been some quirks, if I remember correctly.

As an additional info: I'm in the lucky position to have one of the problematic manuals ready in FrameMaker and in Indesign. Same layout, same images, same fonts. Exporting the Indesign version results in a perfect PDF, but this is expected behavior... Indesign doesn't use the WIN PS driver in the way FM does.

Bernd
Inspiring
September 8, 2006
Helge,

A variation is reproducable using Office 2003 Word and Acrobat 6 and 7, but I don't know if it's the same bug or not.

In this case, only Word's bullets are missing from the .pdf files -- all text is there. But the bullets themselves are gone.

Art