FM Publish to PDF crash solved

[Paul Goble]

FrameMaker was crashing when I used "Publish" with a PDF output or "Save as PDF..."  Using the "Print" dialog with output to the Adobe PDF printer or postscript worked just fine. Maybe my experience will help someone else who is dealing with mysterious Publish crashes.

The problem was an image where I had replaced a TIFF with a PNG by changing the object properties to point to the new file. Apparently this is a bad idea. FM kept a TIFF facet after the image was replaced, and the PDF engine in the Publish module is rather brittle when it encouters this. My lesson: When replacing an image with an image of a different file type, don't just change the file path/name using the Object Properties. Instead, delete the image from the document then insert the new image from scratch.

I was using the Publish PDF engine because I had a couple of PNGs with transparency which I wanted to preserve. Publish can deal with transparency in FM, but Distiller (in all of its forms) cannot.

[Bob_Niland]

What version of FM was this?
I can't reproduce the bug in FM2020, perhaps because the Object Properties won't let me edit the file path/name. It forces the use of [browse] to file, and then updates the Facets.

Indeed, in checking the MIFs, there is no difference between replacing via ObjProp, and deleting and re-importing. For the test image I used, these are the differences between the markups.

‹ImportObFileDI `‹u\›‹c\›Images‹c\›piechart.tif'›
‹ImportObFile `../Images/piechart.tif'›
‹ImportHint `0001AIDETIFFWIN3 '›
‹ImportHint `0001FRAMTIFFWIN3 '›
‹ImportObUpdater `TIFF'›

‹ImportObFileDI `‹u\›‹c\›Images‹c\›piechart.png'›
‹ImportObFile `../Images/piechart.png'›
‹ImportHint `0001AIDEPNG WIN3 '›
‹ImportHint `0001IMAGPNG WIN3 '›
‹ImportObUpdater `PNG'›

But yes, the changes needed include more than just the filename.

[Paul Goble · Accepted solution]

I'm using FM version 17.0.1.305, unstructured.

Somehow I ended up with this inconsistency, as seen in the MIF:

<ImportObFileDI `<u\><u\><c\>Images<c\>Burn Hazard.png'>
<ImportObFile `../../Images/Burn Hazard.png'>
<ImportHint `0001AIDETIFFWIN3    '>
<ImportHint `0001FRAMTIFFWIN3    '>

I right-clicked on the image, selected Object Properties, clicked Browse next to Referenced File, and selected the file.  I haven't done any testing to further determine under which circumstances this happens--and I probably won't, given that I know how to avoid the problem.

As an aside ... Hi Bob--I guess I shouldn't be surprised to bump into former HP colleagues here! After grad school in Fort Collins, I was with Logic Systems Division and its successors in Colorado Springs. I'm getting back into FrameMaker after 10 years using Word.

[Matt S - Tech Comm Tools]

Interesting observation, and thank you for sharing the solution. It would be good for you to open a bug report at https://tracker.adobe.com/#/home to let the engineers know about the issue, which seems to be related to the multiple <ImportHint> tags.

It sounds like an overlooked and perhaps easily remedied issue, so maybe we'll see that fix in a 17.0.4 release?!

Of course, you'd do well to read up on the updates in 17.0.2 and 17.0.3 to see if there are any features or bug fixes you'd benefit from.

[Bob_Niland]

Paul Goble: I'm using FM version 17.0.1.305, unstructured.
That's a bit curious, because my earlier 16.xx won't provide a way to create the inconsistent data.

re: Burn Hazard.png
That sounds like a safety related thing. If so, and an icon, I would nowadays expect it to be an SVG.
Possibly see also: ANSI Z535.1 Safety Colors in Frame
I would have expected ANSI, ISO & DOT to have at least harmonized sRGB colors for on-line PDFs by now, but maybe not.
Also, if you can avoid spaces in file names, by all means do so, as they are still causing problems, a half century on. Of course, if it's an enterprise asset, you may have no control over any of this.

re: I guess I shouldn't be surprised to bump into former HP colleagues here!
Well, it is mostly a coincidence in this case. I'm still using FM only because I bought a personal copy of FM3 back when I was first using FM for a short-fuse project to layout some CD-ROM collateral (media label, J-card, insert). The ink on the CDs was literally still drying when the media shipped to a trade show.