Problems in FrameMaker 7 with CE fonts

Adobe FrameMaker Frequently asked questions

Problems in FrameMaker 7 with CE fonts?

This paper is based on the platform Windows 2000/Windows XP, which supports the standard MS virtual font substitution mechanism for Non-Unicode applications. That means, the operating system supports automatically the display of a certain part of a big font, like "Arial CE", via enabling a specific country setting.

Using languages within FrameMaker
Adobe does not support FrameMaker for easter- and southern-european languages. Nevertheless it is possible to use for example a Greek font, but with restrictions:

  • All dialog boxes remain in Latin-1 font, i.e. it’s not possible to type in Greek indices, to search/replace for Greek characters.
  • No dictionary exist for specific languages.


The following characters are not usable within FrameMaker or are displayed the wrong way (font-depending): CE - Ź and ť

The following characters are not usable within FrameMaker (language-depending):


Language
Font
Problem
Polish
CE
missing Ź
Slovakian
CE
missing ť
Hungarian
CE
-
Czech
CE
missing ť



Using languages for creating PDF documents

  • Create the postscript file using "Acrobat Distiller" driver and define the required PDF settings.
  • Create the PDF file with Acrobat Distiller, using "UnicodeBookmarks" (enable prolog/epilogue, pay attention to the installation instructions, switch on language specific mapping table)


Result:

  • The text is converted correctly, i.e. all characters, which are displayed in FM.
  • Bookmark characters, which are non-western standard, are not converted correctly and may lead to corrupted bookmarks.


Problems coming up in bookmarks
With the default settings of FrameMaker 2 problems arise in the PDF file:

  • Wrong font in bookmarks
    The bookmark texts are converted 1:1 to the target font without transforming it to the language specific subset.
    In other words: Acrobat uses as standard a Latin-1 font. It may also use a unicode font with subsets of language-specific character sets. This must be indicated via a special code (\376\377) at the beginning of a text.
    FrameMaker does not pay attention to the source language font and converts all character according to its ANSI code instead of transforming it into the language-specific subset.
  • Wrong coding of characters
    Two serious bugs occur in FrameMaker:
    • FrameMaker writes some characters the wrong way into the postscript file. This leads to wrong characters or corrupt bookmarks.
    • In some cases 2 different source characters are mapped on the same target character in the postscript file! That means: The entries in the postscript file are wrong, the distiller is not able to distinguish that identical characters.
  • Changes in Shlomos' configuration file 'Unicode.ini'
    The PlugIn has to be configured, i.e. in the file 'Unicode.ini' a specific mapping table has to be created for mapping each source character to the correct target character.
    TS_charset 182 <0389> put % capital letter ETA with Tonos


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