FM8 Unicode Font issues and suggestions

[Michael Müller-Hillebrand]

Carla,

you hit a problem that can usually be avoided easily. Adobe confirmed  
there is a problem with Arial Unicode MS in

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/documentLink.do? 
micrositeId=MS_Customer&externalID=kb402970

But in the first place: Why did you not continue to use "plain old"  
Arial? It *is* a Unicode font and has all the accented characters  
that you may wish for, even Cyrillic and Greek letters, and they all  
work beautifully with FrameMaker 8.0. Arial Unicode MS is basically a  
Chinese font that happens to have a lot of other glyphs as well. But  
at the same time Arial Unicode MS is missing a lot of desirable  
features (that do not hurt Chinese text):

* there is no bold or italic version of the font (you see just  
"obliqued" or "bolded" versions, which look nonsatisfying in print)

* there are no kerning pairs (most visible in letter combinations  
like "Te")

* it has a problem with FrameMaker (or vice versa, who knows?)

It is a good idea (and entirely possible) to handle all languages  
based on Latin (and related) characters with a single font. But it is  
not a good idea to use a single font for *every* language. Please  
read question #3 in the following FAQ:

http://unicode.org/faq/han_cjk.html

My recommendation for you would be to use Arial or Times New Roman as  
far as possible, and then use one of the preinstalled fonts for the  
CJK area languages. If you check out the Internet Options control  
panel, click the "Fonts" button where you can select fonts for  
language regions: the list shows the fonts installed on your machine  
for each language region.

HTH,

- Michael

Am 28.03.2008 um 16:10 schrieb Martinek, Carla:
> OK... weird things are happening.
>
> I've got some Spanish content where I changed the font family to  
> Arial Unicode (from plain old Arial).  Accented characters suddenly  
> developed massive spacing around them  - for example:
>
>      "s   ó   lo"  instead of
>      "sólo"
>
> I need to specify a Unicode font set for our FM8 docs going  
> forward... Our current template specifies Arial and Times New  
> Roman.  I'm not married to either of them, but I NEED Unicode fonts  
> to work in the files I have going forward for some of my docs that  
> have multiple languages in them.  There's 28 other languages in  
> this same doc (a safety sheet), and I was *so* excited that I'd be  
> able to do them all in one Frame file instead of having to use  
> CorelDraw.
>
> Any suggestions?  Settings to change in FM8?  Replacement Unicode  
> fonts to use?
>
> And of COURSE we're on a deadline...
>
> -Carla

--
_______________________________________________________________
Michael Müller-Hillebrand: Dokumentation Technology
Adobe Certified Expert, FrameMaker
Consulting and Training, FrameScript, XML/XSL, Unicode
Blog [de]: http://cap-studio.de/