Missing characters in display

[KenManson]

Some characters are not being displayed on the screen, and appear as empty boxes when printed.
The characters affected are the smart quotes generated by either Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org, and also the 'insert special character' characters.
They display and print correctly with the Adobe Acrobat Reader, but not with PDF-XChange Viewer.
Can you help please?

Thanks,
Ken

[ugradedeveloper]

I just created a Word document using the "smart quotes" and converted it to PDF. The quotes display correctly in my copy of PDF-XChange Viewer.

Can you zip up the file in question and attach it to a post in this forum? I expect the PDF-XChange developers will want to see it.

Lewis

[John - Tracker Supp]

As Lewis said (Thanks..)

We will need the files (Both Word and PDF - zipped) to be sure we can help - but firstly please do make sure you have a very recent buuild ...

[KenManson]

Thanks for your help. I've attached a zip file with the Word and PDF files in it. My PDFXchange Viewer is Version 2.0 (Build 42.3).

Ken

[John - Tracker Supp]

Hi Ken,

its odd - because using the latest release of our products (today) all functions correctly here - please see the attached.

I am using Office 2007/Vista 64/PDF-XChange Version 4.0168 to create the file and the PDF-Xchange Viewer 2.0042.5 to View the file ...

[KenManson]

Hello John,

I can successfully view the PDF file that you created, but not the one I created. I've attached a screen shot so you can see what I'm getting.

Thanks,
Ken

[John - Tracker Supp]

Hi Ken,

I can - and I can view in Acrobat etc too.

Can I ask what OS you have ?

also - please ensure you have the latest Viewer build - an update was issued yesterday - a full uninstall/restart then re-install is reccomeded

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hi Ken,

I did some checks on your file, it was created using "PDF Complete version 3.5.2.1"

The number of embedded objects in your file is
7 TimesNewRomanPSMT Identity-H and
5 TimesNewRomanPSMT WinAnsiEncoding
while in the file John created using our driver there are 9 and 6 respectively.

p.s. But John is right that in the last build of our viewer (42.5) your file is also displayed correctly.

[Lzcat - Tracker Supp]

The problem is that your file uses a potentially "weak" font - TimesNewRomanPSMT with an Identity-H encoding and specified as CIDToGIDMap when the font is not embedded.

Handling of such events was added recently in the latest build (2.0.42.5).

However this font usage scheme is really dangerous - the file will be unreadable if the user's PC does not contain TimesNewRomanPSMT font or this font is different from the creator's one.

It is strongly recommended to embed such fonts (or use a different encoding method).

[KenManson]

I've downloaded the latest build and I can now see all the missing characters, so thanks for all your help in this.

I don't know about the strange font - I just selected Times New Roman in MS Word. And PDF Complete doesn't appear to give you any options about whether or not to embed fonts in the document - it just creates a PDF file to its own specification. But I'm not really concerned about these issues for the moment. I just wanted to use PDF-Xchange Viewer to view and print documents, and it now does it correctly.

Thanks again for your help,
Ken

[Stefan - PDF-XChange]

Hi Ken,

Glad that everything is working for you now.

The problem as Victor explained is the BAD practice used by the guys who made "PDF Complete". It is possible that there are some settings which you have not changed, but their way of not embedding is also not good. If you can I would suggest you contact them and point them to this topic so we all have a better and more strict PDF society so all of us need to create and discover fewer workarounds (which will not work in all cases e.g. like when the user does not have the font or has a different version etc.).

Best Regards,
Stefan