Text missing from PDF

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I am a long-time and very experienced user of FrameMaker, Acrobat, and all associated tools. My XP-SP2 system is thoroughly debugged and fully updated.

When I create PDFs in Frame, sections of the text come up missing. The document remains correctly formatted and organized - there are simply missing sentences, paragraphs, etc. in no discernible pattern. I have tried every fix I can think of and all those I have found by searching online - to no avail.

These documents are created from scratch in Frame 7.2p158; I have updated the installation at least once without solving the problem. The PDFs are being created by every known process: print to Distiller (7.0) within Frame; Save As PDF; print to generic PostScript and pass to Distiller. The missing text remains consistent within all processes.

The fonts involved range from junk of unknown origin to (most of my fonts) true Adobe Postscript. Changing fonts does not cure the problem, although it sometimes changes which parts disappear. There is no particularly complex formatting involved (no equations, no unusual character overrides). These documents are mostly contracts and other simple but rigidly formatted documents. None involve imported graphics.

I have tried all variations of saving to MIF and RTF and re-importing. This sometimes changes the faults, but does not cure them.

This problem occurs ONLY with FrameMaker. I can export perfect PDFs, some from very complex source documents, from Word, InDesign, CorelDRAW and a dozen other tools, using any fonts on my system.

(I am dismayed at how hard Adobe support has gotten to use - as the owner of nine of their most expensive apps, I should be able to get better online support without calling in and begging permission!)

If anyone can point me to a known bug, a known fix, or a good starting point for unraveling this problem - or confirm that they've seen a similar error - I would appreciate it!

[Annie_Johnson]

It Could be a problem with the font lists.

Try doing a search for adobefnt*.lst and delete all the font lists.

[_Bernd_Meissner_]

Art, NitroPress,

there's something new I'd ask you to check. I'm continuing to track down this bug, and meanwhile Adobe support is involved. I've got the feeling that we'll get the beast this time ;-)

Could you check your fonts folder for any large CJK fonts? If there are any, could you please do the following:

- Remove them all from your font folder
- Reboot TWICE. Rebooting once would give the same result as deleting the FNTCACHE.DAT and rebooting, the *second* reboot uses the newly written file.
- Create and check your PDF... what happens?

Explanation: In my case I found out that this is definitely a font issue, caused by CJK *.otf fonts (no problems with ttf or ttc fonts). It doesn't matter if they're used in your FM documents, the bug happens if the are just there. Removing them all cures the PDF problem permanently (remember: reboot TWICE after making any changes to your font folder), and now I'm putting them back one by one, in order to find out the problematic ones. Not all of them trigger the bug, this makes it even more complicated to find out what's happening. I'm currently collecting a list of fonts that don't work here...

Bernd

[Art Campbell]

Berndt,
What is a CJK font? I did searches for all my .otf files, and none include that string as a prefix or part of the file name.

Art

[_Thomas_Michanek_]

> What is a CJK font?

CJK = Chinese Japanese Korean
See http://www.ascendercorp.com/cjk.html

These are usually huge font files with "Asian" names like
Minion, Kozuka, Myongju, Heisei, Mincho, Adobe Song, Adobe Ming, etc.

[_Mars__JD_]

I'm not a power user, and I haven't read all of the posts.

Is there a difference between a) printing to the distiller, and b)doing a "save as," then changing the doc type to PDF?

If not, that may be a possible workaround. I'm curious, because latter method is how I output to PDF.

JD Mars

[_Bernd_Meissner_]

JD,

no, there isn't any difference, since the bug strikes at the creation of the PS file (which happens in both cases).

Thomas,

thanks for explanation. I'm writing so much, and still to short... ;-)
BTW, Minion is not an Asian font, at least on my PCs and Macs.

Bernd

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

But it SOUNDS Asian. :)

I was slightly confused by CJK, too, but figured it out after a bit.

[_tom_lundin_]

My company has been seeing this issue for about a year now. Nothing seems to fix it. We have tested every solution anyone can suggest. The biggest difficulty is that it is not consistent. So anytime someone tries something new, it *may* work, then they think what they did was the solution. Sooner or later you see another bad PDF, and try another solution.

I spent a lot of time with Adobe Technical Support, and they couldn't reproduce the problem (again, as it is not consistent). After months of back and forth, I let the issue drop as we were not getting anywhere. But now, it is causing so many problems that I will need to restart those talks.

Same version of Frame listed above, plus the versions 7.1 and 7.0. Adobe Acrobat 6 and 7. Windows XP. Large and small PDFs. Even saw this happen in InDesign just the other day.

[Art Campbell]

Tom,
Did you try the work-around? Deleting FNTCACHE.DAT and rebooting?

And Berndt, I don't think I have CJK on one system; will check the other tomorrow.

Art

[_Rebecca_Officer_]

Just throwing some more data into the mix in case it helps anyone's troubleshooting. We saw this a couple of years ago, mostly in documents that:
1. were FM7.0, not FM6 (problem appeared when we upgraded) and
2. had Illustrator EPS diagrams and
3. the diagrams included text in the Myriad font (which was embedded) and
4. Myriad wasn't installed on the PC that made the diagram or the PDF.

OS was Win2K. Illustrator could find Myriad because it was in the Illustrator font folder. The diagrams looked okay in the PDFs, but some of the following pages were missing text.

Installing Myriad on our PCs fixed it, mostly. Dropping the resolution to 300dpi fixed it permanently.

Cheers, Rebecca

[_Bernd_Meissner_]

Tom,

maybe we will get a step further this time. Although I can't tell at the moment, in which way CJK fonts are involved, and why some work, some don't, there is one thing that was confirmed by several users now: the FNTCACHE.DAT is definitely part of the problem.

On my system I can 'switch' the problem on and off by installing/uninstalling one of the following fonts (list not complete yet):

- A-OTF-ShinGoPro-*.otf
- DFPSongStd-W*.otf
- HeiseiKakuGoStd-W*.otf
- KozGoPro-*.otf
- KozGoStd-*.otf
- KozMinPro-*.otf
- KozMinStd-*.otf

The fact that either deleting the FNTCACHE.DAT (temporarily) or removing the CJK fonts (permanently) fixes PDF output has been confirmed by several users now (also outside of this forum).

Bernd

[Helge Blischke]

Some time ago in this thread, I asked to get (an URL to) a sample file that shows this error (the .ps or .tps file before distilling, of course), because I'd like to verify or falsify my suspicion on this issue. Please!

Helge

[_Bernd_Meissner_]

OK, guys, I know I probably go on your nerves meanwhile, but there are some more things to check. My latest tests have shown, that it's most likely NOT a specific CJK font, but the SIZE of the FNTCACHE.DAT file. This one increases very fast by adding CJK fonts, which led to my (probably) false assumption, that the fonts themselves cause the problems.

My large collection of FNCACHE.DAT files shows an interesting fact: All working versions are below 1.5 MB, all non-working versions are above this size, up to 3-4 MB.

So if you want, tell me the size of your FNTCACHE.DAT files, and if you currently encounter the bug or not. I still hope to get a clear picture... and a fix in the end :-)

Thanks,
Bernd

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Bernd, you are in no way getting on my nerves, and after finally following up on your suggestions, I think we need to award you at least the Bronze Star in Adobe Combat for your services. :)

First, my FNTCACHE.DAT file was 2767k. I deleted it.

Then I opened my font list and searched out all the CJK fonts, and deleted them - I don't have any use for them except perhaps in viewing some PDF documents that are partially in Asian characters. Those who need them will have to find other workarounds, but deleting them was a perfectly acceptable alternative for me.

(A hunting tip: open your font list, set it to Details and sort by file size. There are one or two very complex fonts that have file sizes around 9-15 megs, but the next block down, with file sizes between about 2200 and 3200 KB, were ALL CJK fonts on my system. Most Western fonts are 8-900k and down.)

Deleted FNTCACHE, deleted the CJK fonts, rebooted, tested my most problematic documents... perfect PDF rendering. My FNTCACHE is now 792k, and I think you have precisely nailed the cause of the problem. I concur that something about the bloated size of FNTCACHE.DAT, caused by the recent prevalence of CJK fonts on systems that never intentionally installed them, is the root cause of the problem.

Congrats on some excellent e-detective work, and thanks!

[_Bernd_Meissner_]

NitroPress,

I'm glad it works for you, too. One more voice confirming the right direction.

Thanks for the Bronze Star... but now I don't want to imagine what I had to do for the golden one ;-)

Bernd

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Silver Star: Get Adobe to admit the problem and issue a formal workaround, preferably one that lets users keep their CJK fonts.

Gold Star: Get Adobe to FIX the freakin' problem!

But I'll concede that your star deserves silver tips, at least. :)

[_Bernd_Meissner_]

Well, I guess I'm not without chances ... but a Bronze Star with silver tips is nice anyway ;-)

I know that someone at Adobe cares already. It seems still a little bit difficult (but not impossible) to intentionally cause this bug, but I will be the squeaky wheel until I get my grease... and the Gold Star ;-)

Bernd

[Art Campbell]

Bernd & Nitro,

Removing the CKJ fonts on one system seemed to help; they either are or weren't present on the second system that encountered the problem though.

The problem certainly seems to be in the method/size of caching though, I think that's been established (Thanks Bernd!).

On the third hand, a search for *.otf turns up lots of files that don't seem to be either in the font folder or ATM light. So I'd hesitate to use my data about the CKJ fonts as a determining factor -- I think there's some font mapping going on that seems to be hidden from users...

Art

[_Bernd_Meissner_]

Art,

using ATM creates a different situation (from mine). I don't use any font management on XP. About the "hidden" otf fonts: Most likely they have been installed by other Adobe applications within a user/application support folder. These fonts are only used by Adobe apps (but not FM).

Bernd

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Art -

The issue does not appear to be the CJK fonts per se, only their whopping aggregate size. Each CJK font file is 10-20 times the size of a Western font file. It appears to be the bloating of the FNTCACHE.DAT file that is the root cause of the problems.

My WAG is that some part of FrameMaker is sufficiently outdated to choke on a font data file vastly larger than it was designed to handle. Removing CJK fonts from the system, if possible, is a simple fix.

It is sad confirmation that Frame is built on too much "old code" that is likely to continue causing problems until Adobe sees fit to do a thorough review and update.

[AxialInfo]

Bernd, I encountered missing fonts in a PDF last night, so I saved the then-current FNTCACHE.dat, deleted it, rebooted, and now have a new FNTCACHE.dat that's the very same size (1.1m). Rebooting and rebuilding the FNTCACHE has fixed the problem for the time being.

Comparing the two files with a binary file comparison shows that they're different, although not being conversant in binary-speak that's as far as I can go with it.

The two zipped are just 356k; if they might be of interest I'd be happy to beam them to you; my e-mail is on the http://www.axialinfo.com website.
(btw, WinXP, 4gigs of RAM)

Sheila

[_Bernd_Meissner_]

NitroPress,

I'm not completely sure where the problem first appears, and if FM is the main culprit. According to my tests the following happens:

- the FNTCACHE is read (once) during system startup, probably by the windows PS driver.
- deleting the FNTCACHE creates a new one at next startup... BUT:

File properties show, that the "last access" time is *before* the writing of the cache file is done, so I suspect the order of events is:

- create empty FNTCACHE
- PS driver reads empty file
- write font information into file
- finish startup

This is why I always told you to reboot TWICE, in order to make sure the FNTCACHE is definitely read and used (not the initially empty file). A single reboot after deleting the cache file *always* works for the time the PC is running, so this is not a permanent fix...

Sheila,

thanks for offering the files. They need to be read by someone who speaks PS fluently... not me ;-)

Bernd

[Art Campbell]

Bernd

You're right, the fonts are under Adobe application directory trees, but some (not all) are listed in the Distiller font folders list... which I'd interpret to mean that they're somehow in the mix.

Art

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Art - I quit using ATM quite a while ago, when I realized that XP has almost the same functionality (or entirely the same) built in. Is there any value left in using the separate manager?

[peter minneapolis]

>Is there any value left in using the separate manager?

I've had the experience that some identical fonts on different machines (copied from one machine to another, not just same name) render slightly differently with and without ATM, on XP. In my case, the slight differences were enough to change line endings and create major content reflow. Both FM instances were same point release and had the same PrinterFontMetrics setting in their Maker.ini files.

So, if all workers in the work flow have the same setup regarding the presence of ATM, there should be no surprises.

HTH

Peter Gold
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