Data Merge not displaying special symbols - Clock Face Eight Oclock

Report · Apr 08, 2023

I'm just reposting this as I still looking for a solution to make the Clock Face Eight Oclock (U+1F556) symbol to appear in my pdf after exporting using the Data Merge feature.

-The Noto Emoji font has the CLOCK FACE EIGHT OCLOCK (GID: 834, Unicode: 1F557), it has also been installed on my machine.

-My csv file contains the clock face for the specific cells

-I can see the clocks in the csv file when I open it. The CSV file is structured with various fields (i.e. variables) along the columns and various records (i.e. countries) along the rows.

-The CSV has encoding set at UTF-16 LM BOM.

-I have changed the font in the Adobe InDesign template for the cells that I am trying to map the clocks to.

-I confirm that I can see the cell (which is empty at the moment) has the Noto Emoji font

-I then re-export to PDF using Data Merge and nothing appears

Please help! Would anyone know how to get this symbol to appear?

Thanks,
Jeff

Report · Apr 08, 2023

You haven't said what operating system you're using. If you're on a Macintosh, there a couple other fonts which might be worth trying instead of the Noto Emoji font.

The Mac has a Character Viewer application which can search for Unicode values, and it can display fonts you have installed which contain a particular Unicode glyph.

There are two other fonts which contain glyphs for that Unicode value—EmojiOne and Apple Color Emoji. If you have those fonts you might try them instead of Noto Emoji font.

Report · Apr 08, 2023

PS: A few years ago I wrote an article focused mostly on the Mac Character Viewer called "How to Find the Font That Has the Glyph You Need." It available at CreativePro.com is you subscribe to that site:

https://creativepro.com/find-font-glyph/

Report · Apr 08, 2023

One more thing occurred to me is information about Noto fonts which might be causing an issue. A thread which originated in February was added to this week about dingbat fonts called "Zapf Dingbats will not work in InDesign"

https://community.adobe.com/t5/indesign-discussions/zapf-dingbats-will-not-work-in-indesign/td-p/135...

If you scroll down to a font discourse by Bevi Chagnon, she points out something important about the Noto fonts:

"Look carefully at the list of Noto fonts included with Apple's System Fonts: https://developer.apple.com/fonts/system-fonts/

Notes:

They list only regular weights for most fonts, so you don't have a complete set of font weights for design projects.
They are versions for dedicated languages and dialects.
Therefore, they are intended to present the user interface in various world languages, not for publishing.
And there could be embedding and licensing issues. Check the fonts in Font Book or your font manager. (See details in the next message)."

Perhaps because the Noto fonts are intended for in computer interface rather than for publishing, that is causing your problems with Data Merge.

Report · Apr 08, 2023

Continuing my investigation, I see that while Noto fonts from Apple might be for interface only, Noto Emoji is apparently an open source font from Google Fonts.

According to this page, it can be used for print:

https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Emoji/about

Report · Apr 09, 2023

Hi Steve, this is the font that I downloaded (from Google fonts). I did a test today of just simply creating a new document, adding a text frame and then inserting several Noto Emoji CLOCK FACE EIGHT OCLOCK (GID: 834, Unicode: 1F557) symbols. The font and symbols appear in the text frame but when I save as PDF --> File -> Export -> Save As -> Adobe PDF (print) the redered version is completely blank.

My operating system is: Windows 11 Pro

Do you think that this is a bug? Or do you think I should see if I can find the clock within a different font family?

Thank you in advance,

Jeff

Report · Apr 09, 2023

Just to add, I have opened the windows character map (windows+r, charmap) and when I look at the Noto Emoji font I don't see the same glyphs that I see available in Adobe InDesign (see the screen shots). Would this be part of the problem or if they are shown in InDesign does that mean that they are indeed available?

Report · Apr 09, 2023

You've got a couple of threads going on this now, so I've chosen this one to reply.

Just want to be sure that your export settings (and you are exporting to PDF, right, not printing to PDF) are set to embed the font. Subsetting shouldn't be a problem, but you can change the setting to embed the entire font and see if that changes anything.

Report · Apr 09, 2023

And to rule out that this is a Windows issue, maybe you should post that blank PDF and let the Mac users see if it's blank for them, too.

Report · Apr 09, 2023

What if you export as EPS or JPEG?

Report · Apr 09, 2023

@AGuyLookingForASolution: When you view the Glyphs panel, there are two sort orders, selected from the panel menu. That may be why your Windows character map has a different order?

Report · Apr 09, 2023

I did a little bit of work trying to reproduce your reported behaviors on my own system, and here's what I found:

1) I can export plain-vanilla PDFs from InDesign using the clock face glyphs from numerous fonts, including Noto Emoji, Noto Emoji Color SVG, and Symbola. No problems at all on my Win10 system, with fonts downloaded from Google Fonts. So I am suspicious that you report that your own exports are blank. Can you tell us which Adobe PDF Preset you're using to export? I used PDF/X-4:2008. I am also interested in seeing the PDF that you made, so we can pull it apart and maybe learn from it why your PDFs are blank.

2) However, I can't get any glyphs with Unicode values above FFFF into an InDesign doc via Data Merge. Seems to be a hardcoded limit there, and there's a non-zero chance it'd get fixed, eventually, if we posted a bug report to the InDesign dev team over at indesign.uservoice.com. But I've tried it with a few different fonts, with a variety of different :cool_button: glyphs that have hex values over FFFF, and none of 'em come through via Data Merge.

Edit: the COOL glyph that's coming through as :cool_button: when I read post after whacking "Submit" is rendering just fine in the editor. So I suspect I have another bug report to file:

Report · Apr 09, 2023

<<SOLUTION BELOW>>

It looks like I have finally figured out a solution or I should say a compromise. After lots of trial and error, I noticed that I was able to save to PDF all the clocks in the Noto Sans Symbols 2 font when I just did my simple test -- a new document with a textframe and inserted the symbols directly into the textframe. I then exported and saved as Adobe PDF (print) and all the symbols were present, including the 1F557 (see attached pdf).

However, when I tried to do this with the Data Merge, setting the cells in the template to Noto Sans Symbols 2 and reecoding the CSV file to UTF-16 LM BOM the 1F557 clock unfortunately still doesn't appear!

It would be interesting to note if others are getting the same result when trying to map CLOCK FACE EIGHT OCLOCK (GID: 834, Unicode: 1F557) to table cells in InDesign and are also getting nothing when exporting. I ended up trying the Noto Emoji, Symbola, Open Sans and Noto Sans Symbols 2. None were printing the unicode symbol.

Now to the good news, I noticed there was another clock TIMER CLOCK (GID: 1329, UNICODE 23F2). When I tried this symbol out in the Noto Sans Symbols 2 font it did indeed print when using the Data Merge!!! This was also the case when I tried the HOURGLASS WITH FLOWING SAND (GID: 998, UNICODE: 23F3). Could there be a size length limit for the UNICODE? The four-digit codes seemed to work with Data Merge (at least for the two I tried above).

I hope my pain has help other users in the community and thank you to you all for your help and support.

Report · Apr 09, 2023

Could there be a size length limit for the UNICODE? The four-digit codes seemed to work with Data Merge (at least for the two I tried above).

Yep, that seems to be the case. If you don't use hexidecimal, then you might not realize that we're posting the same thing... in hex, the number after FFFF is 10000. In the programming languages I vaguely know, it's really easy to handle the four-digit "basic multilingual plane", but there are more steps to handle anything higher than FFFF. So it's unsurprising that the Data Merge code in InDesign hasn't been updated to handle stuff beyond the basic multilingual plane. That's why I am prepping what is either a bug report or a feature request for the devs who read the posts we make over at indesign.uservoice.com; because I know that this is simply something they haven't gotten around to, yet.

Report · Apr 09, 2023

Unicode values over 10000 are a problem. They need multiple character codes, and a lot of apps won't handle that. I know my apps won't. Best to stick to lower codes.