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Switching Fonts in a template


daniel

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Maybe we should forget about the PC issue and focus on the Mac. The reason why is I only installed FusionPro on a PC temporarily to see if my Mac was the problem. But now I no longer have that PC. I'm back to my Mac. I can't load any of my special CJK fonts into FusionPro. Here are the list of the fonts that don't show up in FusionPro:

 

Droid Sans Fallback

Noto Sans Mono CJK SC

Source Hans Pro CJK SC

Apple SC Gothic Neo

 

Apple Gothic is useable in FusionPro but when I preview it looks like the Marcom issue. Latin characters are collapsed.

 

Arial Unicode MS is useable in FusionPro and looks right in preview, but doesn't work right when I collect the assets file and upload to MarcomCentral as you saw in the screenshot. A person from Graphics Support collected a similar template and I uploaded their assets file and it worked fine in MarcomCentral. But when I collect the same template on my own, I result in the same problem. So it must be something on my FusionPro software wrong. They had me reinstall it several times, same issue happened. And the PC also had the same issue with a clean install.

 

Here are my files:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/vrk10u12nzo8gur/fonts.ini?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4yfmpusww19rnop/fonts.err?dl=0

 

Thanks for your responsiveness!

Okay, thanks. The next step is to grab the actual source font files from your Mac for all the fonts listed above and provide them to Support. However, please DO NOT post them here, or on Dropbox, or on any other public forum or location. Please contact Support and ask them for an FTP upload location. Tell them that I instructed you to upload the files to our FTP site, and ask them to let me know when they're uploaded.

 

Also, when you say these are your "special CJK fonts", what exactly does that mean? Where did these fonts come from?

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The fonts are free, you can download them here:

 

Droid Sans Fallback https://github.com/android/platform_frameworks_base/tree/master/data/fonts

 

Noto CJK

https://www.google.com/get/noto/help/cjk/

 

Source is the same thing as Noto, so no need to make that work.

 

Apple SC Gothic Neo comes with any mac. But I don't really need to make this work, I was just using it to test.

 

Arial Unicode MS comes with every computer I believe, so you should have that. This is really the only font I want to make work. The rest are backups if I can't get this one to work. It must mean something FusionPro isn't showing these fonts correctly or refusing to let me use them. Again though, Asian support is enabled and MacRoman is off like everyone has been instructing me to do.

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The fonts are free, you can download them here:

 

Droid Sans Fallback https://github.com/android/platform_frameworks_base/tree/master/data/fonts

 

Noto CJK

https://www.google.com/get/noto/help/cjk/

 

Source is the same thing as Noto, so no need to make that work.

 

Apple SC Gothic Neo comes with any mac. But I don't really need to make this work, I was just using it to test.

Okay, thanks. I will try these fonts on my Windows and Mac machines.

Arial Unicode MS comes with every computer I believe, so you should have that.

Well, actually, it's part of Microsoft Office, but most people have that. Still, there are different versions of Arial Unicode MS out there, so I would still like to take a look at yours specifically, especially since it seems to work for everyone else.

This is really the only font I want to make work. The rest are backups if I can't get this one to work. It must mean something FusionPro isn't showing these fonts correctly or refusing to let me use them.

Well, it may mean something, but it's not necessarily directly related to the problem you're having with your version of Arial Unicode MS.

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Okay, I tried these fonts, on both Windows and Mac, and I had a lot of trouble with them as well, but I don't think the problems are FusionPro's fault.

I downloaded DroidSansFallback.ttf, and it installs on both Windows and Mac, but it doesn't seem to be completely valid on Mac. Here's what it looks like in the Font Book:

http://forums.pti.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=1375&stc=1&d=1449880575

If I do "Get Info" on that font in the Font Book, the Language and Script entries for the font are completely empty, which is not only remarkable, I think it's not actually valid according to the True Type font specification.

 

So I'm not surprised that it doesn't work in FusionPro either. The name of the font, and the fact that you're downloading it from an Android development site, suggests that it's designed for Android, not for Windows or Mac.

 

That said, it did load into FusionPro on Windows:

http://forums.pti.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=1374&stc=1&d=1449874851

But it didn't compose correctly. And it didn't load into FusionPro on Mac.

 

Anyway, I could do further investigation, but this seems like just a bad font to me. Any valid font should specify its supported scripts.

I downloaded NotoSansCJK.ttc.zip, which contains a TTC (True Type Collection) font.

 

Windows says that it's not a valid font file, and won't install it at all, so that's a big red flag right there.

 

On Mac, this installs a whole series of fonts such as Noto Sans CJK JP, Noto Sans CJK KR, etc. When I try to load these fonts into FusionPro, I get a whole bunch of messages like this in my fonts.err file:

Error: Could not get Encoding for Noto Sans Mono CJK TC Regular. Font skipped.

I'm not sure why those messages aren't in the fonts.err file you posted. Either that isn't really the fonts.err file from your Mac, or it was generated before you installed those fonts to the system. You did do a "Load All Fonts" in FusionPro after installing those, right?

 

At any rate, though, FusionPro does not think that those fonts are valid. Preliminary investigation shows that the Mac system APIs don't think those fonts have valid encodings. I'll need to investigate further, but these fonts don't appear to be completely valid True Type fonts either.

Apple SC Gothic Neo comes with any mac.

You mean Apple SD Gothic Neo. I'm investigating this further as well.

DroidSansFallback-Windows.jpg.40892c70ca03e299af2fb31a2aeca612.jpg

DroidSansFallback-Mac.jpg.0ed3e78528f3c359631432bfd2e30dd7.jpg

Edited by Dan Korn
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Does it help any to know that all the CJK fonts that are useable except for Arial Unicode preview in FusionPro with the latin characters collapsed like this? https://www.dropbox.com/s/qoi3xvu35zl8kgt/Screen%20Shot%202015-12-11%20at%202.06.00%20PM.png?dl=0

No, just looking at that picture of the output doesn't help me figure out anything. I already said that I would need to look at your Arial Unicode MS font, the actual font file, and that you should contact Support to get instructions to upload it to our FTP site.

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Thanks Dan. I picked Droid Fallback because of this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CJK_fonts

 

They list Arial unicode MS and Droid San Fallback as Pan-Unicode fonts which is what I'm looking for because we have locations around the world that want to type in english and their native languages. Since I couldn't get the Arial unicode MS to work, I tried other fonts like that.

 

I've also tried using Adobe Acrobat XI, but still had the same problem with Arial unicode.

 

I've emailed the fonts to support.

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Thanks. I got your fonts.

find anything weird with my version of arial unicode ms?

No, there's nothing weird about your version of Arial Unicode MS. It's actually exactly the same version that I have on my development Mac, which was installed as part of Microsoft Office for Mac 2011.

 

And I am able to reproduce the problem where a job collected from my Mac, using that same Arial Unicode MS font, does not compose properly in FusionPro Server on Windows using the collected Assets.dat. I'm currently investigating this problem as my top priority.

 

I'm actually surprised that this problem hasn't been seen before. Part of my investigation is forensics to determine whether this is a regression from an older version.

 

I don't know how long this investigation will take, nor how long it will take to have a new build with a fix installed on MarcomCentral. (This all would have gone faster if you had worked with Support in the first place, but we're on it now.)

 

For now, the workaround is to use the other Assets.dat provided by Graphics.

 

I am also able to reproduce the problems where certain fonts do not load on the Mac, specifically some of the fonts installed with OS X such as the Apple SD Gothic Neo family. I'm investigating this as well, with a slightly lower priority than the Arial Unicode MS problem. (Again, you seem to have uncovered a problem that slipped by not only our internal testing, but thousands of other users, for quite some time now.)

I picked Droid Fallback because of this article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CJK_fonts

I see. I still consider that Droid Sans Fallback font to be malformed, and therefore FusionPro's failure to load it to not be a bug.

 

I'm still looking at the Noto fonts, but I suspect that those not are completely well-formed either.

They list Arial unicode MS and Droid San Fallback as Pan-Unicode fonts which is what I'm looking for because we have locations around the world that want to type in english and their native languages.

Yeah, it sure would be nice if more fonts were universal in that regard, wouldn't it? Unfortunately, people who design fonts rarely design them with VDP (variable data) in mind, especially variable data in Unicode from any possible language.

 

The expectation among font designers is that users will pick different fonts for different languages, such as a Japanese-specific font for Japanese text, in a static design program such as InDesign, not that there will be something like a web form entry where a user can type just about anything for the data.

 

The other issue is that such "Pan-Unicode" fonts, which can support a wide array of Unicode glyphs in multiple languages, tend to be rather large, and often do not give users of all of those languages much choice in variations of glyph appearances. For instance, someone who is designing a document in Japanese will probably want to be able to pick from a set of Japanese typefaces, just like an English speaker will want to pick from among many various fonts.

 

Some applications will silently substitute or switch to a different font than the one chosen by the user for text that the font doesn't support. However, it's hard for a VDP application to do this, as we don't really want to change the font specified by the VDP template designer behind their back, as they likely won't notice the change in composed output right away like they would just from typing into an on-screen editor.

 

So this is actually a big problem in our increasingly globalized variable data industry. But VDP templates are almost always designed with the expectation that the data will have certain limitations and constraints, a very common example of which being that a template designed by an English speaker will be run with English, or at least Western, data. Large multinational companies who use MarcomCentral to generate marketing materials for multiple countries tend to have specific versions of templates for different markets and languages.

 

(Even in your template, what happens if the user types a mixture of, say, English and Arabic? Now you get into much more complicated scenarios of mixing left-to-right and right-to-left text, and there isn't always a single "right" answer of what to do in that kind of situation. It's just not possible to be able to anticipate every possible thing that an arbitrary user could enter as data.)

 

Even PDF itself doesn't make it easy to just swap out fonts for Unicode data, as encodings are either language-specific or based on glyph IDs instead of Unicode code points.

 

Anyway, enough of my rambling. I think that what you're trying to do just isn't really easy to accomplish given current font technology. But (other than typing this) I am working on analyzing the problem with Arial Unicode MS, and I hope to find a fix.

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Here's an interesting article which talks about why there are not really any truly all-encompassing Unicode fonts:

http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/01/16/disappointing-state-of-unicode-fonts/

 

There's a link from there to a font called "Unifont", although I would read the license terms for that font carefully before using it in a VDP template.

Edited by Dan Korn
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Thanks for your continued serious look into this issue and for your well thought out and honest explanation. I learned a lot from it. Good to know that this effort might help others out there. Looking forward to the solve, I know it's in good hands. Merry Christmas!
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