Deeply weird font kerning issue

[Daniel Frankham]

We've experienced something similar (using Structured FrameMaker 7.0p578
for Windows, and Acrobat 6) -- but only in text, not diagrams. We use
FrameMaker 7.2 and Acrobat 7 now, and we haven't experienced the problem
with those -- but then we haven't created any really large PDFs with it
yet.

The problem as we experienced it was like this: a PDF generated from a
large FrameMaker book would *sometimes* contain garbled text. Some
letters would be run together, so for example all the letters in a word
would be on top of each other; other text in the same line would be very
spread out. This effect would usually be seen in lines containing
in-line headings, punctuation marks (especially smart quotes), or
non-keyboard characters (the degree symbol and Greek letters were common
offendors). The affected PDFs would print exactly as they appeared on
screen. If you closed the PDF and re-opened it, it would look fine. But
if you left it open for a while, the garbling would often return sooner
or later. The effect would often appear in the most badly affected book
while the PDF was being printed, so checking the PDF before you started
printing wasn't enough to avoid junk printouts.

This affected all our large books to an extent (by large I mean between
600 and 2000 pages), but for some reason the 600 page book was the
worst. This book was originally created by another company, so we don't
know its full history. It was used as a template for our other books, so
it's possible they inherited their problems from it.

-- 
Daniel Frankham 

 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com 
> [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of 
> Steve Rickaby
> Sent: Wednesday, 30 April 2008 1:26 AM
> To: framers at FrameUsers.com
> Subject: Deeply weird font kerning issue
> 
> FrameMaker 7 for Mac, Illustrator CS2, OS X 10.4.11.
> 
> I appreciate that this is not specifically a FrameMaker 
> issue, although FrameMaker is involved. It relates to a truly 
> strange last-minute 'gotcha' on a production run for a book.
> 
> The book contained diagrams that were created in Illustrator, 
> saved as EPS files, imported into FrameMaker and a .ps and 
> press-quality PDF created from that via Distiller. The 
> diagrams used Frutiger Roman and Monospace 821 for text.
> 
> On checking the pre-press proofs, the production editor 
> spotted some text 'corruption', in that some legends in one 
> diagram in a test print from the final PDF had very uneven 
> kerning, even to the point of overlaying characters. The 
> 'corrupted' legends were words bracketed on either side by 
> guillemets, the double diagonal brackets that I believe the 
> French use as quote marks (they mean something special in UML 
> notation, which was why they were in the diagram).
> 
> I went back to the original diagrams, which looked fine. Ok, 
> I thought, invisible 'corruption': I can fix this by 
> replacing the problem text string. So I did, then reimported, 
> re-cut the PDF and test printed it. And the 'corruption' had 
> moved to the next instance below of a word enclosed by guillements. 
> 
> Right, I thought, I'll replace that and all will be well. You 
> can probably guess what happened next... the 'corruption' moved again.
> 
> There were four strings set in Frutiger and enclosed in 
> guillemets in the diagram. When I got to the last one and 
> replaced that, I though all would be well, but what actually 
> happened was that the 'corruption' moved back to the first 
> text instance.
> 
> At this point I started to feel a little like Mickey Mouse in 
> the 'Sorcerer's Apprentice' sequence in Disney's 'Fantasia'.
> 
> To cut a long story short, I figured that the problem, 
> whatever it was, was related in some to the number of 
> guillemet pairs in the diagram. My fix was therefore to make 
> one of the rectangular objects in the diagram solid white 
> fill, duplicate the last guillemet-braced legend on the 
> screen, and *hide it* behind the solid white block.
> 
> It worked. But why?
> 
> --
> Steve
> _______________________________________________
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