Skip to main content
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

Participating Frequently
August 25, 2006
Arnis,

yes, I just did this test again (although I've done it before for several times). It is reproducible on my PC at 100%.

1. Save book > PDF --- Text missing
2. Reboot, save book > PDF --- Text missing
3. Delete FNTCACHE.DAT, reboot, save book > PDF --- WORKS!

According to my tests, the problem doesn't occur during the distilling process. It happens before, while writing the PS file. I've done that separately ('save to file' option using Adobe PDF printer) and found the PS file to be corrupt as well.

PS file creation *does* use Windows system resources, doesn't it?

Bernd
Arnis Gubins
Inspiring
August 25, 2006
Bernd,

Interesting. Thanks for confirming this.

Yes, you're quite correct that the PS file creation in FM is dependent
upon the system resources.

As far as the difference between printing to file + manually
distilling and the Save As route goes, they are both functionally
identical. The only difference is that the Save As route assumes that
the printer instance is hooked to the PDF port, which triggers a
sequence of events in the background. This process prints the FM files
to a postscript file using the same Adobe PDF printer instance (PS
files are labeled with a .tps extension in this case), calls
Distiller with the joboption specified in the printer dialogue,
deposits the PDF in the specified location, deletes the .tps file when
Distiller has completed creating the pdf and then closes Distiller.
James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
August 23, 2006
I might have a chance to try that fix later today and will report my findings back. If it really is The Workaround, serious thanks and kudos to Bernd and all!
Participating Frequently
August 23, 2006
Art,

that's good news and a valuable confirmation. Maybe even Adobe now has an idea where to look at ;-)

How I came to delete this file? Pure despair of crippled PDFs under a deadline... ;-)

I knew that the AdobeFNT**.list files could cause troubles on Mac and should be deleted from time to time. So I just did a search for everything that contains "...fnt..." in order to trash it. Well, not the dlls, of course, but everything that looked like a cache file. Finally the FNTCACHE.DAT turned out as being the only culprit.

Yepp, champagne for all ;-)

Bernd
Arnis Gubins
Inspiring
August 25, 2006
Bernd,

Good sleuthing! Just as a test for your empirical workaround, when you
have the text dropouts, have you tried simply re-booting instead of
deleting the font cache and then rebooting? This would remove one more
variable and add more weight to a possible workaround that others
could use.

AFAIK, there shouldn't be any dependence on the font cache with the
distilling process as you have to explicitly specify where Distiller
has to look for the fonts, i.e. Distiller doesn't use the system
resources to let it know what is available.
Inspiring
August 23, 2006
Berndt & Nitro,

I had a chance to test deleting the font cache file and then generating the .pdf this morning. Worked like a charm on the gnarliest book I have, one that I've never been able to print directly to the PDF printer before -- it always required the Xerox printer driver PS file to Distiller work around.

I don't know why it works, but it certainly seems to be the work around that kills the bug.

Berndt, why did you think of killing the cache file? Just a hunch or something else? I didn't even know it existed...

Cheers,
Art
James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
August 22, 2006
I don't see how the primary problem could be with Distiller when it works flawlessly with so many other apps, including things like InDesign with very complex pages, and non-Adobe apps not noted for their clean output such as Word and CorelDRAW. I haven't heard of any such problems with anything except FrameMaker. So, you'd have to go a long ways to convince me the fundamental problem doesn't lie within Frame... :P
Inspiring
August 22, 2006
Yup. Am WAGging, too. I was not assuming the problem could only be a Distiller one, though. I wanted to also consider other factors, like seeing if it was certain fonts or not, thus the list.

Cheers,

Sean
James Gifford—NitroPress
Legend
August 22, 2006
Sean - I don't think it's any one font or family (assuming good quality fonts). I am reasonably sure that I converted a problem document to Times New Roman and had the same missing text problems. Sometimes changing the fonts will change the parts that drop out, but not fix the problem.

If I had to guess, it's related to the Distiller or FrameMaker working space and is caused or exacerbated by large physical or virtual memory spaces. (Tried to install an older version of Frame on a new, big-RAM system? Can't do it!) I suspect a similar glitch is at the heart of this problem - an overlooked bit of code that makes assumptions about the maximum memory size and thus causes overruns on the Postscript font space.

Complete WAG, I admit.
Participating Frequently
August 22, 2006
Sean,

why should this become necessary? A PDF *only* allows editing, if the used fonts are installed on your local system (and thus assumes that you're a licensed user), no matter if you embedded fonts or not. So the license restrictions forbid anything that allows a direct download of the font file, but not embedding within a PDF.

Thomas,

I've been checking the Fntcache files using a HEX editor. Well, I'm not a programmer, but the working and the corrupt version definitely look like a... well... a Fontcache ;-)

The question is: What has the Adobe PDF Printer to do with this special cache file?

Bernd
Inspiring
August 22, 2006
Oh, sorry, not what I meant. As an aside I meant that given the requirement that you must password protect your PDFs, you might want to change fonts anyway.

But, I am really wondering if we can get a list of affected fonts.

Cheers,

Sean
Participating Frequently
August 22, 2006
Art,

are you saying the (semi)fix works for you, too? Well, this could be a hint... maybe it becomes possible to really FIX this thing one day.

Sean,

I know (possible) license restrictions of fonts, but this is definitely the wrong track. All documents *have been working* for years and *still work* after deleting this §$%& DAT file and also still work on other computers. All fonts I'm using allow PDF embedding. So a font could possibly result in a distiller error message or in the not-creation of a PDF, but wouldn't pretend that all is well and create a PDF that's missing random text blocks.

Bernd