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Polish text doesn't show up properly. Instead you get weird chars like question marks. Anything but the proper Polish diacritics. I have tried with Arial CE and all the fonts that normally don't pose any problem but unsucessfully. Any clue?
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re: Polish text doesn't show up properly. Instead you get weird chars like question marks.
That's expected behavior when the font in use doesn't populate a glyph for the codepoint entered.
re: Anything but the proper Polish diacritics.
Even with a generous Unicode font, FM may not support combining diacritics, if that's how you are doing them, and if it does support combining, what's going into the document is not the sequence but the precomposed Unicode character it maps to, so even if you think you are working with a legacy 8-bit overlay font, FM may be creating Unicode code points (above U+00FF).
re: I have tried with Arial CE and all the fonts that normally don't pose any problem but unsucessfully. Any clue?
Arial CE is a legacy overlay font, no? I presume you are applying a Character Format to ensure that Arial CE glyphs are used?
I would suggest using a well-populated Unicode font. Use Arial Unicode MS until you get a better one (AUM has iffy font metrics).
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If you are uisng any version of FM newer than FM7.2, then you must use Unicode values and an appropriate font (as Error indicates).
Recent versions of Arial should support most CE codepoints of the unicode set.
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Dear Arnis
I have to confess that my command of these concepts as codepoints, glyphs, and unicode related term has a lot of room for improvement. The file I am talking was saved using Framemaker 8 with Arial CE and I am using FM 2015 wth the same font and I cannot see the text correctly. Is there any parameter I can modify within FM to correct this? How do you access to the unicode values to correct this behavior?
I really appreciate your help.
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Use either the Windows Character Map tool or the internal FM character mapper [under the File menu] to select the desired characters.
You can also use the appropriate language-specific keyboard sttings in Windows and this should also enter the correct Unicode value for the character.
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re: I have to confess that my command of these concepts as codepoints, glyphs, and unicode related term has a lot of room for improvement.
Well, anyone using any WP or DTP app needs to gain some command of these issues, or they are at high risk of output having blanks, question marks or simply incorrect and nearly random characters where some specific localized or specialized symbol (glyph, character) was intended.
In FM 8 or later, stop using legacy overlay/codepage/substitution/replacement fonts (which require a font override or Character Format with Font Family election to appear as the desired glyphs). Arial CE is almost certainly one of these. Get a Unicode font (probably but not always .OTF) that populates a sufficient number of code points to cover the script (regional character set) required.
One way to ID a legacy font is:
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Probably your Arial CE was a virtual font which was created by Windows. Windows made Arial (Unicode font) appear as several non-Unicode fonts with CE for Eastern European languages.
This had been needed for applications which did not understand Unicode such as FrameMaker up to FrameMaker 7.
Now you should just replace Arial CE with Arial.
Arial has all characters for Polish.
Open the font pod and and select Arial CE and replace it with Arial.
FrameMaker should map the non-Unicode characters of Arial CE to the corresponding Unicode characters of Arial automatically.
Where does your Polish text come from?
Is this from a translation agency? Which font did they use for the translation?
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re: Probably your Arial CE was a virtual font which was created by Windows
That's one of two (maybe more) things that are rather mysterious about Window Character Map, and of course not explained at all by its Help.
So, for the best odds of desired results, use a Unicode font, stick to Unicode code points, and avoid combining characters.
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Hi Bob,
It's known that the Windows Character Map may show characters although they are not included in the selected font.
If you want to use a reliable character map tool, then I recommend BabelMap:
BabelStone : BabelMap (Unicode Character Map for Windows)
Best regards
Winfried
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re: BabelMap
Hmmm. Just like WCM for the odd synthetic Unicode behavior noted earlier. Shows codepoints above 0xFF in legacy fonts. Also annoyingly insists on selecting a Unicode Block - no apparent option for show all.
Also, BabelMap doesn't so this, but does anything? It would be nice to have a little applet into which one can paste a single character, and the applet would report the code point. Might not be trivial, based on the complexities of the Windows clipboard, and copy/paste generally.
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> It would be nice to have a little applet into which one can paste a single character, and the applet would report the code point.
I use a bookmarked website for this. These both do the job nicely:
This website is also useful for working with character set encodings:
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Thanks. Bookmarked.
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Yes, it's very annoying that Windows Character Map will show characters
in a font that don't exist in it. I use Popchar to show the actual
characters.