Unusual characters appearing with Arial Unicode MS

[Alan Litchfield]

Hi Berny,

> You may already have several replies, but on the off chance you don't I'll
> chime in.

Actually you were the first.

> FrameMaker is incapable of using Unicode fonts and fails to recognize
> anything beyond the standard ANSI character set without some registry edits.
> Having said that, I use regular Arial (non-Unicode) in my documents and I am
> able to get em and en dashes.

It was those characters that alerted me to the problem. What I actually need
are the macronised vowels. Those do not exist in the ANSI character set.

Silly me. When I read this, "FrameMaker supports TrueType, Open-Type®, and
Type 1 fonts on both Windows and UNIX. This makes it easier to share documents
across platforms without any loss of type quality. Enhanced Unicode
(UTF-8/UTF-16) support provides Asian users with access to a wider set of
printers by enabling font downloading and subsetting..."
(http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker/pdfs/nfh.pdf) I assumed that meant
FM supports Unicode. In actual fact it means that FM doesn't.

Oh those cheeky little marketing monkeys. They'll get you every time.

What it goes on to say is that XML data that includes UTF-8 or UTF-16 will not
lose characters because their character codes are retained and recalled during
output. Of course, in this project one is not using XML, is one :/

The peculiar thing is though, I would have thought that if FM 7.1 can't
recognise UTF-16 character sets, then how come it is able to display asian
characters at all, even incorrectly? Shouldn't they just show up as blank
spots/underscores/little blank rectangles?

Alan
-- 
Alan Litchfield MBus (Hons), MNZCS
AlphaByte
PO Box 1941, Auckland
http://www.alphabyte.co.nz