Chinese fonts in FrameMaker 9

[Jim_Eisenbraun]

We're long-time FrameMaker users; and we set Chinese mingled with Western characters for one of our jobs. This worked fine in FM 4, was broken in FM 5 and onward, and seems to be possible again in FM 8 and FM 9 (we have FM 9 and are testing).

In testing FM 9 with Chinese, we find that the PMingLiu font displays and prints correctly but that FM 9 inserts a blanks space (which is not deleteable) at the transition point from the Chinese to a Western punctuation (or other character; typically, however, comma, period, parens, bracket, etc.). This is a killer problem, in that we cannot remove the space and we very much would prefer to use FrameMaker.

Has anyone else noticed this problem? PMingLiu is a common Windows Chinese font. We are testing with other fonts (but for the moment, using PMingLiu is important to us).

Jim

[_Amit_Agarwal_]

Hi Jim,

I am sure you would have tried these:
1. Para Designer -> Asian Tab -> Western/Asian Spacing -> Optimum -> Change it to 0%
2. Creating Combined font for PMingLiu + TimesNewRoman(etc)

Do send me your .fm file if in case this issue still exists at Amit.Agarwal@Adobe.com

[Jim_Eisenbraun]

Hi, Amit:

Thanks for the suggestion. We had actually tried that--and it works. It may help to explain a bit what we were doing. Because Asian font handling was broken in FrameMaker 5 and 6 (and we were still running mainly 6 and 7 on Macs and only recently upgraded a couple of our licenses to FrameMaker 9), we were running a few jobs in FrameMaker 4 (incredibly enough; it had everything we needed and handled Asian fonts well). So we were importing a Frame 4 job into Frame 9 via MIF and also directly via the "click-on" upgrade path. Doing that tended to screw up the spacing of the punctuation within Asian > English punctuation. On the other hand, keying the Chinese followed by English punctuation directly in Frame 9 works just fine. This is a case where "import" or "update" seems not to work, but keying directly does. I hope that this explanation helps.

Thanks for your suggestions, though. Helpful.

Jim