Bullets not visible in PDF

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pete
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Bullets not visible in PDF

Unread post by pete »

Hello Tim,

I have a problem that a colleague cannot see the bullets in the pdf that I generated with H&M 7.3.6. I see the enumeration bullets with Acrobat Reader, but he uses Acrobat Pro and sees no bullets. This is not happening with older PDF's I generated in the past, perhaps with an older H&M version, I am not sure at the moment.

My colleague says that he sees a difference in the properties of the PDF documents. In Acrobat Pro a font type of"T3Font_1" or "T3Font_2" is shown for the PDF's, that show bullets, but my new PDF without bullets shows "T3Font_0". But this is no conscious decision, I am not aware of any changes I made.

Best Regards,

Peter
pete
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Re: Bullets not visible in PDF

Unread post by pete »

Oh, I see. Glenn posted about the same problem some days ago.
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Tim Green
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Re: Bullets not visible in PDF

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Pete,

I've tested Glenn's projects and we've confirmed that this is a reference printer driver issue. You set the driver for PDF output in View > Program Options > PDF. Instead of setting the screen device or the driver of the physical printer you have connected to your system, set the Microsoft XPS Document writer driver. Alternatively, go to the Printers module in the Control Panel, select Add Printer and add a standard Deskjet, Laserjet or Brother laser printer from the standard Windows list and use that (you don't have to have the physical printer, of course). Customized drivers from printer manufacturers often cause strange problems when used as a reference for PDF output. :?
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Steffen Heller
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Re: Bullets not visible in PDF

Unread post by Steffen Heller »

Hello everyone,

I am having the same problem:
Bullet points in published PDFs are only displayed in Acrobat Reader but not in Acrobat PRO.

I tried to follow the explanation given here and changed the settings at View > Program Options > PDF to "Microsoft XPS Document Writer" or to "HP Deskjet 450" (a printer that I added before), but unfortunately bullet points are still not displayed in Acrobat PRO.

Just in case, it might be helpful, here is some more information:

* Besides "normal" bullet points there are other symbols that are not displayed as well in my PDFs. It is symbols like arrows and tickmarks. They all stem from different wingdings collections.
I am mentioning this because the thread "Bullets - Outline numbered: Wingding font" (https://helpman.it-authoring.com/viewto ... 34&t=14596) talks about problems with wingdings so perhaps this could be (part of the) problem.

* The first time I stumbled across this problem was when I used version 7 of Help & Manuals to publish documents that where originally created with version 6.
Because of this, I thought the problem had to do with changes between the versions or with me using different settings in my different versions. But I couldn't find anything. The settings for "Font Embedding" and "Program Options > PDF Export" are the same. But perhaps there is something else I didn't look for (?)

Any ideas what I should try next?
Thanks for helping
Steffen
My current Version: 7.4.0 Build 4590
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Tim Green
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Re: Bullets not visible in PDF

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Steffen,

Please try the following things, in this order:
  • First, in the Font Embedding section, activate the check box options down at the bottom for embedding TrueType font collections as Type3 and for embedding symbol fonts as glyphs.
  • If that doesn't help, try changing the main font embedding setting first to CID and then to Type3
The Type3 embedding setting should actually always work, at the cost of the text being very slightly less sharp in the PDF. If the above doesn't help then please try the current stable beta of Help+Manual 7.4, which you can get here:

https://www.helpandmanual.com/download/ ... p-v740.exe

Just install on top of your current version to update. This will not change any of your settings etc.

If you still have problems, please mail a small demo project to support AT ec-software.com (replace the AT with @) and we'll check it out. If this is still an issue we'd like to see it soon, because 7.4 includes a lot of PDF improvements and we'd like to have all issues covered before the final release. 8)
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Steffen Heller
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Re: Bullets not visible in PDF

Unread post by Steffen Heller »

Hello Tim,

I tried what you said:
Tim Green wrote: First, in the Font Embedding section, activate the check box options down at the bottom for embedding TrueType font collections as Type3 and for embedding symbol fonts as glyphs.
My settings were like that already.

Tim Green wrote: If that doesn't help, try changing the main font embedding setting first to CID and then to Type3
The Type3 embedding setting should actually always work, at the cost of the text being very slightly less sharp in the PDF.
With CID, the PDF looked like before: normal text, but no bullets (and other wingding symbols also missing):

Image

For comparison, the correct PDF as shown in Adobe Acrobat:

Image

With Type3, the PDF had no readable text anymore:

Image

Tim Green wrote: If the above doesn't help then please try the current stable beta of Help+Manual 7.4, which you can get here (...)
Installed 7.4 and repeated everything with the same results.

Tim Green wrote: If you still have problems, please mail a small demo project to support AT ec-software.com (...)
I created a new project ExportTestProject.hmxz (a single file with only 34 KB) where I copied the examples from the above screenshots. When published to PDF, this new file produces the same results as my main project (which I was happy about as it shows that the error can be reproduced with standard settings).

Will that ExportTestProject.hmxz do or am I missing something?
Thanks for helping
Steffen
My current Version: 7.4.0 Build 4590
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Tim Green
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Re: Bullets not visible in PDF

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Steffen,
Tim Green wrote:Will that ExportTestProject.hmxz do or am I missing something?
That's fine. As long as the problem is reproducible that's all we need. 8)
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Steffen Heller
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Re: Bullets not visible in PDF

Unread post by Steffen Heller »

Tim Green wrote:Hi Steffen,
Tim Green wrote:Will that ExportTestProject.hmxz do or am I missing something?
That's fine. As long as the problem is reproducible that's all we need. 8)
Okay, just sent off a mail.
Thanks for helping
Steffen
My current Version: 7.4.0 Build 4590
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Steffen Heller
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Location: Austria

Re: Bullets not visible in PDF

Unread post by Steffen Heller »

Problem solved.

Deactivating the option
* Configuration > Publishing Options > Adobe PDF > Font Embedding > "Export Symbol text as glyphs"
seems to do the trick.
Thanks for helping
Steffen
My current Version: 7.4.0 Build 4590
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