garbage charaters in Thai PDF bookmarks

Report · Oct 29, 2012

Hi,

Does anyone have any ideas why Thai bookmarks cannot be displayed correctly in Acrobat (4.0 and above) after generated from FrameMaker 7.x?

I have tried both system font - FreesiaUPC and 3rd party font, however both can't resolve the garbage charaters in PDF bookmarks.

Moreover, I copy & paste the title/heading from PDF page to bookmarks and some of the codes are missing.

Please help.

Thank you.

Regards,
P.C.

Report · Oct 29, 2012

Hi,

I think this is because FM7.2 and lower doesn't support Unicode.

So best way to solve this issue is doing an upgrade to FM 8 and higher and using Unicode Fonts.

Of course you will run in some issues, you have to do some rework in foreign languages, i.e. index markers, cross reference definitions etc.

If you can't do an upgrade, check out bookmark feature of http://microtype.com/TimeSavers.html . This solved several many of this issues.

In former times some of my customers used this to solve such problem in Russian and Greek.

Bye

Markus

Report · Oct 29, 2012

> ... why Thai bookmarks cannot be displayed correctly in Acrobat (4.0 and above) after generated from FrameMaker 7.x?

This is apparently a limitation of the pre-FM8 legacy overlay fonts (non-Unicode) scheme.

It's not just Thai. It doesn't work for bookmarks based on text containing the standard Symbol or Zaph Dingbats fonts either. What gets passed into the PostScript for PDF bookmark generation is apparently just the 8-bit Roman text code points, and no mark-up for font overlay.

Other than aftermarket tools, the only solution is to migrate to Unicode, which also requires FM8 or later.

Here's the test I ran.

New simple document.

Heading1 text:

X5C

Tag the 5 as Dingbats.

Tag the C as Symbol.

Print to PDF.

The body text appears, approximately, as

XXX

The PDF bookmark appears as:

X5C

It also doesn't matter whether you tag as Character Format or as local font override. Neither gets into bookmarks. This choice, however, does matter for generated files, because it needs to be Character Format for TOC and IX to work, for example, and the Ch. Format needs to be in-catalog for those files.

I might add that none of this is new. A search of any Framemaker forum looking for "character" .AND. "bookmark" turns up any number of on-point hits. The fundamental problem is the inherent limitations of codepage fonts. Adobe fixed this issue. The "patch" was called Framemaker 8.

Even with aftermarket bookmark tools for FM7, I suspect my example above might not be fixable, because it alternates overlays inside the string.

Report · Oct 29, 2012

You could use Shlomo Perets Timesavers to allow language specific bookmarks through from older versions fo FM. See: http://www.microtype.com/TimeSavers.html and click on BmkStyle.