Wingdings not consistent in .pdf

[FieryPantone]

Thought I'd found an answer to this question, but it must have been in a previous existence … can't find it in the forum, at any rate. So: FM9.0p255 on XP, nifty document prepared with wingdings as the font for assorted callout numbers – white figures on a dark backround, Alt+0140 and up  No problem inserting the callouts in graphic frames or in the body text, but when I distil the document to .pdf only 2, 4 and 5 show up correctly: 1, 4 and 6 show up as empty squares. Opting for a different font (for example, Lucida Sans) doesn't help either: the required character shows up in the File > Utilites > Character palette and on screen, but Distiller blandly tells me "this font cannot be embedded".  Help and advice warmly welcomed!

[yves.barbion]

Hi Niels

I've just done a quick test (Windows XP, SP3). These are the results of the Belgian jury:

• Fm9: same result as yours, but Zapf Dingbats does get embedded properly
• Fm8: Wingdings and Zapf DIngbats both OK
• Fm10: same results as Fm9

So, possible workarounds:

• Use Zapf DIngbats instead of Wingdings. Or, better still, use a "regular" font for callouts. I use Myriad Pro placed on a light-colored background, for example a single-cell table. Doing so, I can also use more than 9 callouts. 😉
  
• Downgrade to Fm8 😉

@Adobe: this bug seems to be introduced in version 9. Please fix this in version 11.

Thanks

Yves

[FieryPantone]

Thanks, Yves! see, world; not every question takes Belgium over a year to solve <g>

I don't have ZapfDingbats, but in the meantime I've carried out a quick test with Open Symbol; does the job, even if some of actual glyphs could be prettier. Now to repeat the test with some other license-free fonts … As for the layout aspects, when I say "callouts" I'm putting numbers in the margin next to screenshots and code listings, then using the same numbers bullet-wise to identify the text comment. Yes, there are times when "background colour" would be a handy property for a text style.

[Michael_Müller-Hillebrand]

@Niels: Expect all kind of problems with not properly Unicode-encoded fonts like Wingdings, they are just old school. BTW, the digits 4 and 5 have character codes 8F and 90 which are empty spots in the Western Encoding. So I would rather expect those characters to not appear… Have you checked the maker.ini entry that lists the "NonTextFamilies"… no idea, if adding/removing Wingdings will change anything. I don’t like that font!

@Yves: We must ask Adobe to fix problems for all supported versions (which would be 10 and 9) and make it clear we don’t want to pay for bug fixes! I know, our common experience is not like this…

- Michael