🚀 go-pugleaf

OK, obviously, no current reader of this forum knows anything about this. To bad.

For small snippets of texts, my current method to do the translation is to save as pdf, then copy the text from the pdf and paste back into an FM-file. In mysterious ways, it is then in Unicode, and I can use regular Unicode fonts without messing with special regional fonts such as greek, CE turk etcetera! That has worked well, but it is of course not a viable method to deal with a complete (largish) structured document.

Hi,

Don't know such a tool, but can report that I have been successful using FM8 to create and maintain publications into 20+ languages, including SE Asian languages.

And our translation vendor do use TRADOS.

/Mats

I assume that you can read them into FM7, apply the special regional "dummy" font (CE turk, etc), and that converting the FM7 file to FM8 remaps the document text to unicode correctly. (This is what I used to do for Russian text.)
Is this a viable workflow until a better tool comes along? I guess it depends on how often and how much you need to do.

Dave, that is an interesting method, if it worked, but it doesn't seem to work for me...

The documents were in FM7 (from the translation agency), with regional fonts I think. Then they were opened in FM8. But no Unicode!

I just tried now, in FM8, with a document that had text in DIN Greek, then saved as FM7 format, then opened again in FM8. The characters were preserved as non-unicode in the original font.

Currently, on this computer, I do not have FM7, and I am not at the client who had the troublesome documents, so I can not test with "native FM7", but I might do that when I come back to the client in a few weeks or so.

But since you got it to work, I wonder what the difference is?

In the original post, I said that Trados is not compatible with FM 8, since that is what the translation agency said. Turns out, however, that the translation agency had not kept their systems up to date! Shame on them! I've had some further communication with Mats Broberg (see post above) that further clarifies that an updated and properly "patched" Trados is indeed compatible with FM8, both structured and unstructured. (The translation agency now claim they have a working unicode flow for FM8, but it is definitely "a bit late" -- the non-unicode documents are already done, so the failure can not be easily reversed!)

It would be interesting, when you get the chance, to open the document in FrameMaker 7 and see which fonts it is using, with the following questions in mind:

Is the font a real font, or a "dummy" font that is a window onto one of the system unicode fonts? Perhaps FM 8 will only remap text that uses a dummy font.

If the font is a real font, is it defined internally (inside the font) as a "standard-encoded" font or does it use a custom encoding? perhaps FM 8 will only remap text that uses a standard-encoded font.

Is the font listed in the NonTextFamilies line in the [Fonts] section of the maker.ini file? Perhaps FM 8 will only remap text that uses a font which does NOT appear in this line. Even if the font is not mentioned in this line in FM 8, perhaps the document was created on an FM 7 system that did include this font it its NonTextFamilies line, thus changing the mapping.

If you have MS Word, there is an option under Tools called "Fix broken text". I have found this solves some encoding issues.