Missing characters in FrameMaker (not PDF)

[Roger Shuttleworth]

Hello All

A co-worker is having problems when typing in FrameMaker. Details as follows:

FrameMaker 9.0p255 (structured) on Windows Vista Business Edition, SP2.

When typing in a paragraph, random characters are missing. By "random" I mean that "contains" becomes "cntas", so it is not missing particular characters - a character can be present one time and missing the next. I'd estimate that about 20% of the characters are skipped. Also, it is not inserting spaces instead of characters, or question marks. There is no character format in use (i.e. we are using default para font), and there are no xrefs or hypertext links in the paragraph.

We replaced the keyboard with a brand new one - no difference. I believe my co-worker knows how to type (could it be that she types so fast that Windows can't keep up with her?).

The other thing we tried was to delete the Windows\system32\fntcache.dat file and then reboot. I know this file has been implicated in problems of missing text in PDF, but have not read anything about missing characters in FrameMaker itself. So far, this seems to have fixed the problem, but our testing is very limited. (I am aware of the MS hotfix for the missing characters in PDF.)

Has anyone else seen this problem? We have ourselves seen a similar, intermittent problem when typing in and around xref elements and/or hypertext markers, but in the present case there are none of these.

Roger Shuttleworth
Technical Documentation
AV-BASE Systems Inc.
1000 Air Ontario Drive, Suite 200
London, Ontario
N5V 3S4
Tel. 519 691-0919 ext. 330