Viewing multiple languages in FM 2019 32-bit

[semble]

My translator sent mif files to me with a Russian translation of English text I sent to him. He uses either FM 2017 or 19t and I have FM 2019 32-bit.

The font he is sending is in the expected Verdana font with the language set to Russian. However, I don't see the Russian characters, rather a set of symbols. When I try to change the language to a different language, including English, the same set of symbols appear.

Is there a solution to this issue?

[Stefan-Gentz]

Please open the MIF file you got from the translator. For 2017 and 2019, it should read:

<MIFFile 2017> # Generated by FrameMaker 2017

or

<MIFFile 2019> # Generated by FrameMaker 2019.

Does it say that? If it says <MIFFile 7.00>, the problem is, because your translator saved them in an old MIF format from before Unicode times and need to resave the file as FrameMaker 2019 MIF. 

See also this thread: https://community.adobe.com/t5/framemaker/problem-displaying-chinese-mif-files-from-memoq/m-p/113191...

[Bob_Niland]

re: If it says <MIFFile 7.00>

If it says that, the font model/coding destruction is apt to be far from the only damage done to file content, and probably needlessly.
MIF 2020, 2019, 2017, etc. can be opened by any FM back to 8.0.

Anyone saving back to pre-FM8 needs to test-run and study their entire workflow. Some issue might be managed, but documents needing non-Roman characters can pose economically impractical challenges.

[Stefan-Gentz]

Exactly so. I see this happening from time to time, and it's nearly always, that the MIFs that were used for translation were created with an outdated plugin used to batch-save all files in a book to MIF. Updating the plugin to support newer versions than FM 7.0 is usually enough to fix the process problem. And as the translations are usually all stored in a Translation Memory, it's usually also enough to just shoot all new MIF files again through the translation process.

[semble]

Thanks all for you help. The translator now understands that we need to be in synch regarding FM versions. I was unaware of the change in character-set support between 2017 and 2019, so now I am better educated.

[Winfried Reng]

The character encoding changed after version 7. MIF files from 2019 can be opened with 2017 without any problems.

Did you check the first line of the MIF files (those which you sent out and those which you got from your translator)?

[Bob_Niland]

re: I was unaware of the change in character-set support between 2017 and 2019,

The character support change was at FM8.0, when Unicode (BMP only) came in. Needlessly saving to FM7 MIF is the likely probem in your case.

FM2017 & 2019 should be able to interchange without issue. In addition to using MIF, FM2019 can save back as binary (.fm) in 2017 format. As long as both sites have fonts, this should be seamless.

Prior to FM8 (and excluding Han scripts), non-Latin characters, such as Cyrillic, had to be done as codepage/overlay. FM8 and later can use Unicode natively (and can still use legacy re-mapped fonts, but it's increasingly unwise stewardship). Saving Unicode Russian back to FM7 cannot re-map the Cyrillic codepoints to legacy 0xA0-FF range, because FM can't guess what glyphs map to what 8bit values in any random old Russian font.

We could see another inflection point when FM adds Unicode SMP support. That won't back-port to any earlier versions.