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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!
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102 replies

James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
September 5, 2006
But it SOUNDS Asian. :)

I was slightly confused by CJK, too, but figured it out after a bit.
Participating Frequently
September 5, 2006
JD,

no, there isn't any difference, since the bug strikes at the creation of the PS file (which happens in both cases).

Thomas,

thanks for explanation. I'm writing so much, and still to short... ;-)
BTW, Minion is not an Asian font, at least on my PCs and Macs.

Bernd
Participant
September 5, 2006
I'm not a power user, and I haven't read all of the posts.

Is there a difference between a) printing to the distiller, and b)doing a "save as," then changing the doc type to PDF?

If not, that may be a possible workaround. I'm curious, because latter method is how I output to PDF.

JD Mars
Inspiring
September 4, 2006
Berndt,
What is a CJK font? I did searches for all my .otf files, and none include that string as a prefix or part of the file name.

Art
Known Participant
September 5, 2006
> What is a CJK font?

CJK = Chinese Japanese Korean
See http://www.ascendercorp.com/cjk.html

These are usually huge font files with "Asian" names like
Minion, Kozuka, Myongju, Heisei, Mincho, Adobe Song, Adobe Ming, etc.
Participating Frequently
September 4, 2006
Art, NitroPress,

there's something new I'd ask you to check. I'm continuing to track down this bug, and meanwhile Adobe support is involved. I've got the feeling that we'll get the beast this time ;-)

Could you check your fonts folder for any large CJK fonts? If there are any, could you please do the following:

- Remove them all from your font folder
- Reboot TWICE. Rebooting once would give the same result as deleting the FNTCACHE.DAT and rebooting, the *second* reboot uses the newly written file.
- Create and check your PDF... what happens?

Explanation: In my case I found out that this is definitely a font issue, caused by CJK *.otf fonts (no problems with ttf or ttc fonts). It doesn't matter if they're used in your FM documents, the bug happens if the are just there. Removing them all cures the PDF problem permanently (remember: reboot TWICE after making any changes to your font folder), and now I'm putting them back one by one, in order to find out the problematic ones. Not all of them trigger the bug, this makes it even more complicated to find out what's happening. I'm currently collecting a list of fonts that don't work here...

Bernd
Participant
August 30, 2006
It Could be a problem with the font lists.

Try doing a search for adobefnt*.lst and delete all the font lists.
August 30, 2006
For those of you who want to install an older version of Frame on a new whiz-bang system, I recommend you try Resplendent Resolver. It, ah, lies to your system about all sorts of things such as processor, memory, and version numbers. I use it to run Fontographer on my 2 GB system. Fontographer normally won't run on a system with more than 512 MB, but Resolver solved the problem.

It's freeware.

http://www.resplendence.com/resolver
Participating Frequently
August 25, 2006
Can only speak about Windows 2000. I have 2 legal versions of FM one on each PC. Only one currently is used to build PDF's. What I do see on the this file is that the file date is the date my system rebooted and the PC that does the most number of building PDFs has the larger of the two Fntcace,dat files. Opening the file with notepad does appear to show printer font names seen among the ansi text. Will have to check my other two systems at home. I am not willing to delete this file at this time when things work. Windows has always had files that keep the same file size when rebooted but change the date and time stamp. One is the swapfile that can be deleted and rebuilds when PC is restated.
Inspiring
August 25, 2006
Just as another data point, I've gone through the same routine with
the same results for several days now. Rebooting without clearing the cache has no effect. Clearing it, though -- still no problems and
repeatable results.

About the fontcache file... It doesn't appear that anyone who's posted
actually knows how it works and why it's there, but logically it makes
sense that if font info is cached, that the cache would be the ready
source of font info for any font-related process. Otherwise why have a
cache -- you'd be reading from the font files....

And the corollary would be that something, somewhere in the system is corrupting or capable of corrupting the cache file in real-time.

Art
Participating Frequently
August 25, 2006
A search on MS website finds that the "Fntcache.dat" has only to results. Both refer to removal of MS programs related to MS Office. Doing a web search on "Fntcache does say that for Windows XP to delete this file and reboot.