Czech alphabets

[_Mira_Miyamoto_]

I have FM 8 and now certain characters in Czech language is not displayed in FM 8, but it will show properly in FM 7.

Because it shows in FM 7 (currently have both FM7 and 8 open and looking at the difference) I am thinking some where, some thing is not "Clicked" or "Installed" or "Told" FM 8 to convert to Czech language or identify certain character in Czech alphabets.

My operating system is Windows XP;

Do you have any idea what/where?

Thank You in Advance.

[MichaelKazlow]

Mira,

The problem is unicode! Welcome to the new world. You would be best
served by choosing a OT font that contains the Czech alphabet and reset
the type.

Mike

[_Mira_Miyamoto_]

Mike,

Thank you, I am not sure what OT font is.. I should mention that I am "technically challenged".

[MichaelKazlow]

OT=Open Type. Windows XP's Arial is an OT unicode font that has most
certainly has a Czech alphabet, but i wouldn't want to set nearly
anything in Arial. Here are some links to get you started to learn about
open type.





Mike

[_Mira_Miyamoto_]

But why did it work on 7 but not on 8? I don't recall using OT font to work with czech characters.

[_Thomas_Michanek_]

> But why did it work on 7 but not on 8? I don't recall using
> OT font to work with czech characters.

My guess is that your czech characters are made available by
mapping these characters to "standard" western character
positions in a non-unicode font. That is, the czech characters
are not part of the "normal" character set of the font, but
replaces some other seldomly used characters.

A unicode font contains many more non-western characters
in completely different character positions. To use unicode
fonts, you must use the correct unicode character instead of
the "fake" character used in non-unicode fonts. So, your
current czech characters are not the same characters in
a unicode font.

I don't know if there are any conversion utilities for special
characters set in a non-unicode font into a unicode font.

--
/Thomas Michanek (a czech name :-)

[_Mira_Miyamoto_]

Under FM 7 and 8 there seems to be many otf fonts stored in the file folder. Also if FM 7 is using the fonts stored in Control Panel/Font folder, shouldn't FM 8 be using them too? therefore FM 8 should display Czech character?

Is there a place in the FM8 configuration that a person should be "clicking" to enable something for the OT fonts, etc to work?

[MichaelKazlow]

Mira,<br /><br />Thomas explained it better than I could. FrameMaker 7.2 and earlier used <br />OTF fonts, but the applications were not unicode aware. It displayed all <br />fonts as intended in their first 128 (or even first 256) ASCII coded <br />character set.<br /><br />FrameMaker 8 is not only unicode aware, it insists that the fonts it <br />uses be proper unicoded fonts and treats all fonts as if they were---it <br />does make a few exceptions for the symbol font when opening earlier <br />Frame and Word files and perhaps a few others.<br /><br />The first part of any font is assumed to be a standard ASCII attributed <br />character, if the font you are using uses a non-standard latin alphabet, <br />it will not appear correctly ---if at all.<br /><br />This is a royal pain for everyone used to the old way of creating <br />multilingual documents. However, unicode handling of documents in other <br />languages allows people to search Frame and better yet PDF files created <br />in Frame in the language of choice and not have to wonder about how the <br />alphabet was encoded. After all, there was no internationally accepted <br />way to encode Czech, Greek, Latvian, Chinese, or Korean as ASCII characters.<br /><br />The transition may be painful, but it will hopefully be worth it. How <br />much worse than the transition from EBCDIC to ASCII can it be?<br /><g, r, & d><br /><br />...Mike

[MichaelKazlow]

It would have been nice if FrameMaker came with a better guide on how to
use unicode fonts. It would have been nice if it came with a way to
convert documents like the one you created. People have been creating
Frame documents the way you did, since I started using FrameMaker at
version 3.2 and I'd bet even before.

Sounds like its time to make a wish:



Mike

[_Mira_Miyamoto_]

Mike and Thomas,

Thank you so very much for the "intense" explanations on Czech alphabets and unicode. My mind is totally blown to pieces!

Seriously...

I am ashamed to say that I don't know much about unicodes. I will do some digging around and figure this out or I can always cheat and use my older version of FM 7.2 (I will learn about Unicodes.)

I thought getting FM8 was going to be so much easier for the translations since we do our manuals in so many languages.

I shall for certain make up a wish list!

Thanks again for everything!

[_Mira_Miyamoto_]

Mike,

You talk about "The transition may be painful, but it will hopefully be worth it. How much worse than the transition from EBCDIC to ASCII can it be?"

Is there a tutorial on how to "Unicode"?

Thanks again,

[_Thomas_Michanek_]

> Is there a tutorial on how to "Unicode"?

Some info on character encodings and Unicode:
http://www.unicode.org/
http://oreilly.com/catalog/unicode/chapter/ch03.pdf
http://runeberg.org/admin/unicode.html
http://www.indwes.edu/faculty/bcupp/things/Characters/chars.html

[_Mira_Miyamoto_]

Thomas,

Thank you Very Much!

[Tigdave]

Can you describe the problem in more detail? I can think of two separate issues here: typing and document conversion.

1) Are you having trouble entering and displaying Czech text as you type in FM 8? If so, make sure you are using a comprehensive unicode font that has the characters you need. The new fonts that come with FrameMaker 8 should be sufficient.

2) Or are you trying to convert old Czech FM7 documents to FM8? Under the right conditions, there's a good chance that FM8 will convert your old FM7 documents to unicode automatically. For example, when I opened my Russian FM 5.5.6 documents in FM 8, it correctly remapped them to unicode automatically. I was mightily impressed, and this conversion feature saved me a ton of work. Perhaps the conversion only works if your original documents use one of the Windows "dummy" fonts such as Arial Baltic or Arial CE. (I was using the dummy font Arial CYR.) Without getting into the details of what a "dummy" font is, what happens if you use FM7 to format the document using Arial Baltic or Arial CE and then read the document into FM 8? If your FM7 documents are using an old 256-character "proper" Czech font instead of a dummy font, then the conversion might not remap the eastern European characters correctly.