FrameMaker 8.0p277 Generated PDF-to-PDF Links Don't Work On Solaris

[Guest]

Currently I create a PDF of a book index pointing to several guides. The company logo in each guide's PDF provides a link back to the index.

All the links worked on Solaris & Windows OSs. Now they do not work on Solaris. I get an error saying, "There was an error opening this document. The file cannot be found."

All files are located in the same directory and they are all there.

The only thing that I have changed is the source was in FrameMaker 7 and it is now in FrameMaker 8. I use Acrobat 9 Pro Extended 9.4.6 and I have the latest updates for both Acrobat and FrameMaker.

I did some more digging and found a difference in the generated postscript file.

FM8

[/Rect[1409 2622 4926 2441]/Border[0 0 0] /Action << /Type /Action /S/GoToR /D /F /F << /Type/Filespec/UF <FEFF0063006D00690063002E007000640066> /F(cmic.pdf) >> >>  /Subtype /Link /ANN FmPD2

FM7

[/Rect[1830 2661 4578 2430]/Border[0 0 0]/Dest /F/Action/GoToR/File(cmic.pdf)/Subtype /Link /ANN FmPD2

I am trying to get off of FM7 and it is counter productive to keep generating our final PDFs from FM7 just to get them to work.

Has anyone else had this problem and know how to resolve it?

[Shlomo Perets]

Cross-file links in PDFs authored in FrameMaker 8 use Unicode-encoded file paths and file names, which are only supported in Windows Acrobat/Reader 8.x (MacOS Acrobat/Reader 7.x or later).

As a result, cross-file links are not functional when the PDF is displayed in earlier Acrobat/Reader versions, even though the target PDFs files are present in the target location.

While it is possible (through post-processing) to change the links so that they are backward-compatible, I suggest checking whether one of the Reader versions available for Solaris supports Unicode filenames and indicating that such a version is required to view the PDFs.

Shlomo Perets

MicroType, http://www.microtype.com

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