ITauthor

There's a periodic problem with creating PDFs where the application you’re using to create the PDF (e.g. Word or FrameMaker) crashes or, worse, it completes, seemingly successfully, but the resulting PDF has chunks missing from it.

The example Microsoft gives is a document with three sections in it but the PDF that you generate ends up containing Section 1 followed by Section 3.

You might have encountered this problem if you’re a FrameMaker user and assumed it was an Adobe issue. It wasn’t, it was a Windows issue.

Here's the hotfix:
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=952909

This was a strange one. I installed a whole stack of fonts that must have included a corrupt version of Times New Roman. Everything looked fine on screen but when I generated a PDF from FrameMaker using the Adobe PDF printer driver, the characters in Times New Roman got strangely mangled.

As it happened, the only thing that used Times New Roman in the template I was using was page number in the index. These came out with hash marks followed by numbers that were completely different from the numbers in the original index:

I went into Control Panel > Fonts and deleted the Times New Roman fonts, then downloaded new versions from typedfont.com.

Note: If you’re using typedfont.com you might not, at first sight, notice the download link. It’s a little link halfway down the page, just above the font table:

However, after installing the new fonts (in Vista: right-click the font file and choose Install), the problem remained.

The problem is that when there’s a font problem the printer’s Font Substitution Table gets modified, telling the driver to use another font instead of the font that has a problem. You can repair the font, but the Font Substitution Table doesn’t get modified back to remove the substitution. You’ve got to do that yourself.

To remove the font substitution for a printer (in my case the Adobe PDF “printer”):

1. Go to Control Panel > Printers.
2. Right-click the affected printer and choose Properties.
3. In the Properties dialog box, go to the Device Settings tab.
4. Expand the section headed Font Substitution Table:
   
     
5. Find the affected font.
6. Click the substituted font and change the setting back to <Don’t Substitute>:
   
   
7. Click OK.
8. While you’re about it – for good measure – go to the General tab.
9. Click Printing Preferences.
10. In the Printing Preferences dialog box, go to the Paper/Quality tab.
11. Click Advanced:
    
    
12. In the Advance Options dialog box, change the TrueType Font setting to Download as Softfont:
    
    
13. Change the PostScript Output Option to Optimize for Portability.
14. Change the TrueType Font Download Option to Outline.
15. Click OK on all the open dialog boxes.

If you were having the same problem I was having, it will now be fixed.

 
Tom Arah has written a review of FrameMaker 8 in PC Pro magazine:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/137286/adobe-framemaker-8.html

For the most part it sounds like users of 7.2 (like myself) wouldn't notice much of a difference. However, the thing that intrigues me is the ability to incorporate Flash movies into documents. When I'd heard of this, months ago, I'd thought: okay but what's the point in that? However, Tom Arah's description suddenly reveals how great that might be:

... this hardly seems like rich media, since the 3D models and vector movies are represented in the FrameMaker document as static bitmaps. Everything changes, though, when you export your document to PDF. Suddenly, when viewed within Adobe Reader, the embedded Flash movie and 3D model spring into interactive life.

Now, suddenly, I can imagine how useful it might be to have a PDF that was designed purely for online viewing and was, perhaps, quite a small document but with a series of inbuilt Flash demos. Anything that's show rather than tell has huge appeal, and this could really transform how we think of PDFs.
 
Screenshot taken from PC Pro website.  © Copyright Dennis Publishing Limited

I get the feeling that ever since Adobe released the DITA application pack for FrameMaker 7, lots of people have been beavering away with it writing structure applications and  their own FrameMaker extensions,  and generally seeing how far they can go with DITA in FrameMaker. It's all a bit hacky - even though the functionality from the application pack is now built into FrameMaker 8.0. The trouble is that the application pack makes DITA possible, but it doesn't make it a realistic option for most folk because you still need to do a lot of work before you can actually get to the stage where you can hope to produce professional quality documentation with it. If you're like me you just don't have the time to dedicate to this. However, there are efforts to bring this to you and reduce the amount of setup work you need to do before you can start using DITA to produce documentation in FrameMaker. One such effort  is DITA-FMx. I haven't  tried it out yet, but you can download it for free from here:     http://www.leximation.com/dita-fmx/ Check out the  online help here: http://docs.leximation.com/dita-fmx/0.01/   It's probably worth a look, but I'm still kind of hanging on for Madcap to get their act together on DITA. Flare seems like an obvious tool to use with DITA, but it wasn't in the recently released DITA 3.0 and I haven't heard any firm plans for when it's going to get added. Adobe have stolen a march on Madcap here, but I suspect Madcap's DITA effort will be worth waiting for - so I'm holding back spending time doing DITA in FrameMaker until I see what Madcap come up with, or until I get fed up waiting.

I've blogged before about the bug in Madcap Flare that results in all paragraph formats having hyphenation switched on.

Paragraphs should never be hyphenated unless they are justified. Hyphenating text that's aligned left looks daft. So the result is that you have to sort out this problem in the FrameMaker files produced by Flare before you can output to PDF. A tedious process, but here's the best way to do it. The same tip applies to any change you want to make to each and every format in a FrameMaker file:

1. Open the FrameMaker file.
2. Choose Format > Paragraph > Designer.
3. In the Paragraph Designer dialog box, click the Commands button.
4. Choose Set Window to As Is.
5. Now make the format change you want to make. In our case, click the Advanced tab and clear the Hyphenate check box.
6. Click the Commands button again.
7. This time choose Global Update Options.
8. In the Global Update Options dialog box, choose whether you want to apply changes from multiple tabs in the Paragraph Designer dialog box, or just the currently displayed tab. In our case, we've only made one change so it doesn't matter which of these options you choose.
9. In the Update Paragraph Formats section, choose All Paragraphs and Catalog Entries.
10. Click Update.
11. Save the document.

That's it. Hyphenation is removed from all formats in the document.

You can now use this document as a template for the other document. To do this:

1. In the book window, select all chapter documents.
2. Choose File > Import > Formats.
3. In the Import from Document field, choose the document you just modified.
4. Select all of the check boxes in the Import Formats dialog box.
5. Click Import.