Pagemaker Equations overlapped in InDesign CS6

[joshiishan]

Many of our legacy pm65 & pmd documents are created using Pagemaker + MathType.

Most of the docs are converted without issue using InDesign CS6. But, some docs when opened in InDesign CS6 show garbled equations. The equations are converted into Images but some characters are overlapped. Pagemaker opens the same document without any issue.

Equation in Pagemaker:

Equation in InDesign:

It would be really helpful if someone can point me to the right direction. We need to manually recreate all equations as of now

[Luke Jennings]

I don't have a fix for your issue, but I can suggest a work-around. Can you save a PDF from Pagemaker? If so, you could place the PDF into InDesign as a link, hopefully with the equations as intact vectors, cropping all except the equations. Alternately, you could try opening the PDF in Acrobat and try OCR to extract the equations, then copy & paste into InDesign (although this is probably a long shot).

[joshiishan]

The ultimate goal is to create Print Material, PDF & HTMLs to make the whole thing web & mobile consumable. InDesign gives HTMLs with Equations as Images and Font details in CSS. But, if we export the HTML directly from Pagemaker, the font details are missed out. So, the symbols created using "Symbol" font are displayed as garbage characters.

We have more than 50K pages to be converted, so we need to set a process that is more scalable and less manual. Copy-Paste needs a whole round of manual verification and error correction.

[maxwithdax]

I am not sure if accessibility (ADA) compliance is an issue for you, but it is worth mentioning that those equations will not read properly for people using assistive technology (screen readers). Best practice for accessibility compliance is to create graphics or label them as figures in the pdf and supply alt-text that reads the equation phonetically.

-Dax

[joshiishan]

Very interesting point, maxwithdax. Thank You. I will surely look into this.

So far we have completely ignored the accessibility perspective as we want to achieve the happy path first.

ADA isn't a concern for us as we're not in the US.

[joshiishan]

UPDATE:

I have found that if I double click the equation in Pagemaker, open it in Mathtype and click Save. It is displayed properly when the file is opened in InDesign.

Now I am not sure why this is happening but it makes me feel it is a font issue. But, I am not able to see which font was used while creating the equation and validate the RCA.