Typophile

Trouble with Truetype encoding for Mac OS

John Nolan

Ok, this should be easy:

I'm trying to get fonts to work with the "save as PDF" in FileMaker 8.

All the Type One's and Opentype fonts I've tried drop extended characters when a PDF is made with FileMaker's PDF generator, although the same page printed to the Acrobat 7 printer works. (This in spite of the fact that FileMaker licensed the Acrobat engine from Adobe.)

Anyway, I find that Truetype fonts work, so I think, weird, but, okay, I'll regenerate my Adobe Caslon as a Truetype for use in Filemaker.

BUT I can't get the encoding to work: é becomes É, that kind of thing. If I generate an OpenType or Type 1 with what I think are the same encodings, the accents work, but the PDF doesn't.

I know I'm missing something simple: I never make Truetype, because I figure OT is the way to go, but not this time.

Thanks in advance.

John Nolan

Well, I've got the encoding sorted. I'm not quite sure what was going on, but I think it was a combination of operator error and cache files.

I still don't know why FileMaker won't produce proper PDFs with OpenType or Type 1.

Nick Curtis

My recommendation is not to use Filemaker for ANYTHING. The program appears to have its own ideas about character encoding which cause havoc anytime it interacts with another program.

John Nolan

It is true that I've had more trouble font problems with FileMaker than with any other program. I should probably look at using data merge in InDesign whenever I can.

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