Updating older versions of Adobe fonts? Slightly off-topic, but related in a way!

[Dov Isaacs]

Craig,

I will assume that the symptoms you are reporting are indeed occurring!

That being the case, it would appear that FrameMaker is simply not mapping the Type 1 Zapf Dingbats character positions to the proper positions in Adobe Pi, a Unicode-based OpenType CFF font. In the old Type 1 fonts, symbols simply replaced the standard ASCII glyphs for both mapping and keying. This is absolutely not true for Unicode-based symbol fonts; thus the need for glyph palettes. If I recall correctly, InDesign tackled this issue years ago by automatically remapping characters in certain key fonts such as Type 1 Symbol and Zapf Dingbats to Unicode within the document when "old" documents were opened and then did a hack to output with such fonts, the user none the wiser!

Any "correct" modern OpenType Zapf Dingbats font, regardless of source (including the OpenType version from Adobe) will have this same mapping issue. The only workaround which I specified before was to somehow get your hands on one of the old Type 1 Zapf Dingbat host based fonts that ship with Adobe PostScript printers.

Either you or the OP in this thread should report this issue as a bug in FrameMaker. If they map the font name "Zapf Dingbats" to "Adobe Pi" then they absolutely need to remap the characters formatted in Zapf Dingbats to their new Unicode value, either permanently in the FrameMaker document if the change is permanent or simply for display and print purposes. Fill out a bug form on Adobe's website.

            - Dov

[cid:image001.png at 01CDF59F.3A828590]

Dov Isaacs
Principal Scientist
Adobe Systems Incorporated

+1 408.536.2896 (tel)
+1 408.242.5161 (cell)
isaacs at adobe.com<mailto:isaacs at adobe.com>

345 Park Avenue
San Jose, CA  95110-2704 USA
http://www.adobe.com<http://www.adobe.com/>






Feel free to print this e-mail if your needs dictate hard copy.
There is no need to feel guilty about printing!
Paper is renewable and recyclable.

ISAACS-MOBILE.corp.adobe.com



From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Craig Ede
Sent: Friday, January 18, 2013 7:25 AM
To: framers
Subject: RE: Updating older versions of Adobe fonts? Slightly off-topic, but related in a way!
Importance: High




Dov,



I didn't initiate this conversation, but I'd like to chime in.



Your points are well taken, but a problem I had with the Adobe PI substitution was that simple bullets were coming across as question marks in my PDFs. That would indicate a mapping problem that is pretty obvious.



Also, you might want to tell the Framemaker team that whenever I open a new DITA document in FrameMaker I get the following messages in the FrameMaker console:



The "Zapfdingbats" Font Family is not available.

  "Adobe Pi Std" will be used in this session.

The "Zapfdingbats Regular" Font is not available.

  "AdobePiStd" will be used in this session.



If Adobe Pi Std is not a problem, maybe they should update the DITA templates for the next release and remove the source of this error. That is, unless Zapf-Dingbats is somehow part of the DITA standard (which really can't be true). The fewer the error messages the more likely we are to see critical errors.



Thanks for all your insights.



Craig

________________________________

> From: isaacs at adobe.com<mailto:isaacs at adobe.com>

> To: framers at lists.frameusers.com<mailto:framers at lists.frameusers.com>

> Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2013 22:07:05 -0800

> Subject: RE: Updating older versions of Adobe fonts? Slightly

> off-topic, but related in a way!

>

>

> Exactly what is the problem you have with Adobe Pi? Adobe Pi was

> designed to serve as a substitute for Zapf Dingbats originally for

> Acrobat and Reader and then for other Adobe applications. Although the

> design of each of the glyphs is not identical, Adobe Pi does do a

> fairly good job as a substitute and in some cases, the glyphs are much

> more modern looking than Zapf Dingbat's highly dated look.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.frameusers.com/pipermail/framers-frameusers.com/attachments/20130118/22a8a408/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.png
Type: image/png
Size: 871 bytes
Desc: image001.png
URL: <http://lists.frameusers.com/pipermail/framers-frameusers.com/attachments/20130118/22a8a408/attachment.png>