Bullets in Structured FM book disappear when generating PDF

[cvgs]

Hi, friends!

I'm working with FM8  and Acrobat 3D 8 in Tech Comm Suite on a Windows XP platform.

I am generating PDFs from FM books created in structured FM. I have a number of unordered lists (ul) which have lovely bronze bullets in FM.  However, when I generate a PDF, they disappear.

I conducted a number of tests and noticed that the bullets display in the PDF up until the time that I add a TOC, LOF, LOT, and Index to the book file.  Then they disappear.

Thinkiing there was something wrong in the book file, I recreated it twice with the same outcome (no bullets).

This does not appear to happen with all of my documents.  In fact, sometimes you have to generate the PDF twice to get bullets, but you do eventually get them.  But I have one guide that is particularly resistant to the bullets.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

[Guest]

I have a plugin (Mekon's Eclipse) with my FM9 addition to author iSpec2200 documents.  Before producing PDFs the plugin will check against the iSpec2200 DTD contained in the plugin and replace any special characters not allowed and they will disappear in the PDF.  Perhaps you have a situation where the bullet character is not allowed.  If so, replace the bullets.  If there is a plugin working with your FM it will probably have some ISO Entities in which bullets can be replaced with it's matching bullet ISO entity and you'll still be able to use bullets in your document.  Not sure if this will apply in your case...just applying what I've experienced with my FM9 and plugin.

Eric G.

[cvgs]

Thanks, Eric. What I have found is that if I have all of the chapter files open when I PDF the book, it seems to help. Also, PDFing sections at a time first and then PDFing the entire book seems to work. It's almost like the bullets (and there are a lot of them) overwhelm Acrobat. It's not a great workaround, but it gets the doc out the door.

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Mary K. Greer

Information Developer - Learning Management Solutions

Intelligent Automation Solutions Client Services

407.771.8187

[Guest]

Nice to hear you found a workaround.  I'll keep it in mind if I ever run into a similiar problem.

Eric