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Question

Quotes and Apostrophes Automatically Convert to Question Marks in Frame 9.0

Forum|Forum|16 years ago
June 3, 2009
5 replies
15186 views

I'm using Framemaker 9.0 without any patches installed (per the Adobe Support reps who advised me when I called that the issues the early patches were supposed to resolve were not actually resolved at all, and that the patches may actually be exacerbating my problems).

This problem is specific to Framemaker 9.0. We haven't experienced it with previous versions.

Randomly at times when we open a new document or work with an existing template (it doesn't matter which), keystrokes that would ordinarily result in an apostrophe or double quotes result instead in a quotation mark.

Has anyone else experienced this problem? Suggestions on how to fix it? We've tried rebooting and uninstalling/reinstalling Framemaker without luck.

Thanks,

JMW

Formatting and numbering

This topic has been closed for replies.

ashrae-editorAuthor

Known Participant

Hello, everyone. First, thanks to all who posted here offering suggestions and volunteering their time. I appreciate it.

I'm posting now to say that I finally (several months later) managed to solve this problem.

Diagnosis: It seemed that Framemaker 9.0 randomly, for no reason discernable to me, began inserting question marks in place of apostrophes and double quotes. From the Adobe Character Sets PDF: "If a character glyph is not available for the selected font, Framemaker displays a question mark (?) in its place." Since turning off Smart Quotes resulted in me being able to insert regular quotes without incident, it appears as if Framemaker suddenly stopped recognizing automatic smart quotes.

The Fix: I'm embarassed to say this, but the solution was simply to install a clean maker.ini file. At some point (I have no idea how), it seems my maker.ini file became corrupt. I have no easy means of comparing the corrupt file to the uncorrupted file, so I can't say exactly where the problem exists, but I do know that I've used this fix to resolve the problem on several different machines in my office.

To all Framemaker users, I highly recommend keeping a known good backup of your maker.ini file for just such occassions.

Happy to have resolved this issue.

Best regards,

JMW

M

Michael_Müller-Hillebrand-basb

Inspiring

JMW, thanks a lot for telling us what you find out.

I have a guess what could have »ruined« your maker.ini. The file is stored in UTF-8 encoding and if you edit it with an editor that is not capable of reading and writing UTF-8 encoding this may lead to problems. BTW, Windows’s own Editor.exe understands Unicode encoding.

- Michael

ashrae-editorAuthor

Known Participant

Hey, Michael.

You're almost certainly correct.

If I remember correctly, I made a change to my coworkers Maker.ini file about six months ago in Wordpad, which, if what the Interwebs tells me is true, does not support UTF-8 encoding.

Note to self: Always edit and save application data files in Notepad.

Thanks for shining a last bit of light on my problem.

Best,

JMW

A

Anonymous

I wonder whether this could be related to that font change that MS did just recently which broke a lot of the character representations in FM. Maybe some systems have the MS update and some others don't.

(grrrr ... I hate this new forum s/w and the search feature) Can anybody recall which thread it was where we discussed this problem just recently? The Microsoft fix was to something in the way some characters were mapped in some common fonts like Times New Roman, and they issued new font files as part of a service pack for Office 2007, I think.

W

Winfried Reng

Community Expert

Hi,

Is your keyboard layout still the original one or is it changed?

That would explain why you can copy/paste correct quotes

but not type.

Did you enter _all_ characters on your keyboard? Are all

other characters correct?

Best regards

Winfried

ashrae-editorAuthor

Known Participant

Hi Winfried,

We all use basic Dell qwerty USB keyboards with original (i.e., default) mapping. I considered several possibilities at the beginning, including borked mapping, but because the problem seems to be 1) limited to one key, and two characters (apostophe and double quotes) and 2) confined to a single application (Framemaker), a general mapping error didn't seem likely to me.

Thanks

ashrae-editorAuthor

Known Participant

An additional (and extremely weird) note:

We were able to copy smart double quotes from another Frame document into the active document and they not only appeared normally, but we were able to manipulate them as well (change size, style, etc.).

My original theory was that the ASCI mapping was off, but that doesn't seem likely in light of this new development.

So, as the problem stands, we cannot enter quotes or apostrophes via the keyboard into either new or existing Framemaker 9.0 documents; however, we can cut and paste quotes into a document and then manipulate them normally using the character designer and keyboard commands (i.e., ctl+i, ctl+b, etc.).

A

Art Campbell

Inspiring

Do y'all have any TSR programs installed?

Anything like a macro recorder, a program that may pop up when you hit a key combination, anything else that may grab those key strokes?

ashrae-editorAuthor

Known Participant

Art,

To my knowledge, we don't. Our IT people are pretty good about not installing superfluous/invasive scripts/apps on our machines, and all of our desktop machines use the same clean build.

A

Art Campbell

Inspiring

Without seeing samples or knowing what your operating environment is, I'd guess that it's a font or unicode chracter problem.

Is the Adobe PDF printer instance set as your default system printer?

Are the existing files that you're opening pre version 8?

***

It would be really helpful to know all the system and file details you can provide. OS, code set, previous version of FM, etc.

***

And as far as the patch releases.... I would suspect the phone guys may be altering their conciousness a bit too much. Both patches are stable and each resolves multiple issues, not just one. So I'd roll them on. I haven't noticed any ill effects. And so far as I know, you can always uninstall them.

ashrae-editorAuthor

Known Participant

Art,

Thanks for the reply. I considered attaching a sample file, but I don't think that's relevant as the problem seems to be specific to a particular machine. For example, when my coworker and I both access the same file on a network drive, I have no trouble inputting apostrophes and quotation marks, but she does. I can discern no actual pattern, although both I and two other coworkers have at separate times experienced the problem. I and one coworker tempeorarily solved this by reinstalling Framemaker after all other efforts (and several hours on the phone with Adobe Tech Support, who were equally perplexed) failed. However, that hasn't helped in this most recent case.

We are all running Windows XP Professional with SP3.

We are not running any Framemaker patches.

We are running the Windows Hotfix KB952909-v2 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952909/en-us)

In the case of my coworker, the Adobe PDF printer is not set as her default printer (she usually selects it manually when printing to PDF).

ashrae-editorAuthor

Known Participant

I'm still thinking it's something related to the fonts on your co-worker's system, because your system doesn't exhibit the symptoms. So I'm thinking it's something unusual or corrupt on that one box.

If you still have some energy left, I'd try isolating fonts as Shelia suggested yesterday, or taking a shotgun approach: backing up her font directories and installing the "known good" set from yours (assuming it's legal, etc., etc.) to see if that makes a difference.

One other thing you may look at would be to create a file on the problem system, hit the keys, and then save the file out as MIF.

Do the same thing on your stable system. Then compare the content of the files in an ASCII or binary editor to see what exactly is being written.

Art

Art,

We've experienced this same problem on three different boxes (mine and two coworkers) at different times. For my and one of my coworker's machines, we solved the problem with an uninstall/reinstall of Framemaker 9, but that doesn't seem to have worked for my other coworker (a fact that makes me wonder if the uninstall/reinstall was part of the solution to begin with).

Point being, this problem is not limited to one box, but has happened only once for the three machines it has affected and appears to happen randomly if seldom (i.e., I haven't been able to discern any pattern based on our builds, fonts, activities, etc.).

We really don't have a "known good" set of fonts, but neither do we have a known bad set of fonts, as we've never actually correlated our fonts to any problems we've experienced or tested them for errors. In most cases (99%), our fonts work flawlessly in all applications, including Framemaker.

I don't have any experience with binary editors... though I'm willing to try your last suggestion. Can you recommend a reliable/intuitive/free one I can download?

Thanks,

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