Two years ago I migrated my template from using the Lucida family created by Charles Bigelow (which I met personally in the 1990ies) to the more Uniccode savvy Noto family for the main text elements (body, lists, tables etc). In particular I wanted to use the condensed variation in tables.
- I never got problems within FrameMaker:
- When creating a PDF via PDFL then the text areas with this font are blank - but use space.
Recently I again was trapape the miniTOC did not appear in PDF. I had not correctly updated my styles and hence the Noto Sans Condensed dragon spit fire. - Creating the PDF via the Distiller route presents something, but this is garbage (not just a font substitution)
This is independent of SaveAs or Publish.
- In the PDF the font Noto Sans Cond is not listed at all - hence it is not found in Windows font folder (where all the fonts reside) - or there is another reason for this.
My personal circumvention of the Noto Sans Condensed problem: Use Noto Sans and apply stretch 85% which (at least for me) gives the same visual impression.
References to this problem:
https://forums.adobeprerelease.com/framemaker/discussion/176/pdfl-does-not-find-installed-fonts-noto...
https://community.adobe.com/t5/framemaker-discussions/font-noto-sans-cond-does-not-behave-in-pdf-cre...
https://community.adobe.com/t5/framemaker-discussions/pdf-converted-from-framemaker-8-become-unsearc...
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I haven't seen any notion that Noto is a variable font. At least I get no answer on my question "is Noto a variable font" by google. And Google Fonts don't give any hint on the Noto page. A typical discription is this from typogram.co:
Noto is one of my favorite open-sourced font family of all time due to its extensive language support. Noto is a joint project by Google, Adobe, and Monotype to eliminate “Tofu,” which is the box that shows up when there is a missing character. Noto has italic styles, multiple weights, and widths, 3,741 glyphs, and supports 800 languages.
From all the avialable ttf files in Noto-hinted.zip I have installed these:
The last one is used for examples of RTL text.
The Condensed variants are only installable, while all others are editable. According to Microsoft that means:
- Editable — The font supplier allows the font to be embedded within a document and allows the document to be edited using that embedded font.
- Installable — This is the most permissive setting. The font supplier allows the font to be embedded within a document, and permits the document viewing application to permanently install the font on the user’s computer. Most applications treat these fonts like those set to Editable embedding.
My understanding of the Installable therefore is that it can not be embedded in PDF... Why this is the case only for the condensed variant is beyond my understanding.
Unfortunately Dov Isaaks is no more in our boat - he probably could enlighten me.
Yes, Noto contains many code points in the Private Use area ... But that do all of the Noto's I have installed, not only the condensed variant.
In the meantime I have the font turned through the mill of FontLab 8 to get another version of ttf files (they are about 15% larger than the original).
PDFL can handle these:
But distiller still is not happy with it:
IMHO there is something rotten in the state of Google (to quote Shakespeare)...
For me it's clear that fonts still cause problems in FM when creating PDF...
But, wait a minute! I have checked in Word 2003 and get this output from the Adobe printer (which is installed with Acrobat 2017 pro):
This leads me to the assumption that the problem is somewhere in Acrobat - the distiller and the printer do not behave, while (at least with the 'milled' fonts) PDFL does
To dig for the background of this problem is IMHO an esoteric effort - which I don't need to do, as I have a reliable solution for my initial demand (condensed appearance in tables)..
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