FM 7.0 on Mac: problems with fonts and pdfs

[fogharty]

I recently updated all the paragraph and character formats in a structured book to go from Times and Helvetica to be all Arial. Bullets and special characters such as the copyright symbol all display in FM fine, but once I try to create a pdf, all the bullets are wrong, the copyright symbols are just apostrophes, etc. a regular bullet • becomes a ¥ (I hope these display properly.)

I have tried creating the pdf using all different settings, creating .ps files and using Distiller, etc.

I can't figure this out. If I use Times and or Helvetica, it's all fine. I have embedded fonts, or not embedded them, or only embedded some. I've tried different font locations, I have both TT and .ps versions of Arial; I've changed Distiller's settings, in short, I've tried all I know.

Can anyone help?

[Pieter_van_de_Sande]

Maybe you should try the same in an empty document and see how those display? It seems as if it goes wrong when printing the PDF so you might opt for trying to print it regularly but using another pdf creator as a printer.

Good luck

[JohannesKrueger]

I guess FM internally uses a character encoding that differs from the one used by the Postscript driver or Distiller. If you look at the character tables, the bullet character is at position 0xA5 in the internal character set, while in the ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8 character set, the same position 0xA5 is for the ¥ character.

While this may be the explanation, I'm not sure if that helps you to solve the problem. Two shots in the dark, maybe:

If you use the \b switch in Paragraph Designer for the bullet, you could try replacing it with \xa5  to see if that works better, or with \x95 (this is the actual character code for the bullet in ISO-8859-1).

If neither works, you could still use a symbol or dingbat font for the bullet.

Johannes

[Guest]

What version of FM 7 are you using, as shown on Help > About?

[fogharty]

I am using FrameMaker 7.0 (Power Macintosh 7.0p492).

I came up with a work-around because other things, such as quotation marks, apostrophes, and accented characters were not appearing in the final pdf. Actually the quotes and apostrophes were intermittent: some would show up and others wouldn't, sometimes on the same page.

I created a character style called "Helvetica" using helvetica as the font, and copied the character format to all the files in the book. Then I applied that style to the bullets and imported the bulleted text paragraph format to the other files.

I then performed a Find and Change for all the other characters: the copyright symbol, the quotation marks, apostrophes, etc. by having the character (for example ©) in the "Find: Text" field and "Change: To Character Format "Helvetica" in the Change field. When selecting the Character Format field, I made sure in the options window that the Family was Helvetica, but the Angle, Weight, and Variation was "As Is" so as to retain the rest of the formatting of whatever characters were replaced; only the font was changed.

A long explanation, I know. Most of you probably knew all this, but I thought I'd post everything for future reference.

If FM existed for Mac OSX, I wouldn't be going through this! Oh well.

So that was my "fix." Exchange a font that would be encoded correctly for one that wasn't, in this case, Helvetica for Arial.

[Guest]

7.0p492 looks like the original unpatched version for Power Macintosh; there are 3 updates to that.  (btw, all FM updates need to be installed in order, oldest to newest.)

http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/product.jsp?product=22&platform=Macintosh

In the readme file for the p576 update is listed:

ClipboardSystem 520935 ANSI character encoding not preserved through paste into Frame.

I don't know whether this is your specific issue, but I would strongly recommend taking a look at the updates.

Congratulations on the workaround you found -- and thank you for posting it.

Sheila

[Be.eM]

fogharty wrote:

So that was my "fix." Exchange a font that would be encoded correctly for one that wasn't, in this case, Helvetica for Arial.

One thing that comes to mind: you're only using fonts which are usually found in font replacement tables of PS printers (Arial > Helvetica), and at least the Helvetica is often set to "don't embed" in Distiller prefs. I've often seen problems with PDFs which don't have their fonts embedded, especially when they are used on more than one platform.

My FM Mac days are long ago, but I can remember one important thing regarding PDF creation: which PS printer/PPD do you use? As far as I remember, the only rock solid solution was to install a virtual printer using the Adobe PS driver (I believe 8.1.x was the last version), using the Adobe PDF printer PPD. While running FM7 in Classic, I think it was working with Distiller PPDs up to version 7 (ADPDF7.PPD). Never tried a newer version, though. The Distiller PPD is the only neutral PPD, which doesn't use any printer-specific functions (apart from the Generic PS Printer, which lacks options).

You also should follow Sheila's tip, get your FM updated to the latest version.

Bernd