Reply To: Issue when trying to create Chinese output

[Derek Read]

Your issue with missing glyphs (Chinese appearing as white space in the PDF when viewed, or possibly question marks) when using the Book via RenderX deliverable would be a font embedding issue. You must have made changes to the DITA OT to get any PDF output to embed the correct fonts into the PDF file so that Unicode characters above code point 255 have the proper glyphs embedded into the PDF (including Chinese and Russian). That is a requirement of the PDF format (as outlined by Adobe) and a limitation of how the DITA OT and RenderX are configured. Out of the box they are not configured to embed any fonts (that is discussed in various other threads on this forum that talk about getting to embed fonts into the PDF for various languages including Russian, Chinese and Greek — bring up your forum profile and click on “Show Posts”).

As to your main issue with “XMetaL Enhanced PDF via RenderX XEP” failing, until this is looked into in depth by someone to see if this is a failure with that deliverable, or due to changes in newer versions of the DITA Open Toolkit, I would suggest trying an older version of the DITA OT. XMetaL Author Enterprise 12 includes three versions of the DITA OT (2.4, 2.2 and 2.0). To switch to an older version:

1. Launch XMetaL Author Enterprise 12.
2. From the Tools menu select Configure Output.
3. On the Advanced tab locate the following and add an underscore to the front to disable it:

DITA_OT_DIR  =  %XMETAL_SHARED_ALL%DITA_OT2.4
_DITA_OT_DIR  =  %XMETAL_SHARED_ALL%DITA_OT2.4

4. On the Advanced tab locate the following and remove the underscores to enable it:

__DITA_OT_DIR  =  %XMETAL_SHARED_ALL%DITA_OT2.2
DITA_OT_DIR  =  %XMETAL_SHARED_ALL%DITA_OT2.2

5. If 2.2 doesn't work then you can enable 2.0. On the Advanced tab locate both of the following and add underscores to disable them:

DITA_OT_DIR  =  %XMETAL_SHARED_ALL%DITA_OT2.4
_DITA_OT_DIR  =  %XMETAL_SHARED_ALL%DITA_OT2.4

DITA_OT_DIR  =  %XMETAL_SHARED_ALL%DITA_OT2.2
_DITA_OT_DIR  =  %XMETAL_SHARED_ALL%DITA_OT2.2

With version 12, when neither version 2.4 or 2.2 of the DITA OT is enabled (using those overrides) then DITA OT version 2.0 is run. On most systems all three DITA OT versions will be located here:
C:ProgramDataSoftQuadXMetaLShared

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Before trying XMetaL Author Enterprise 11 which version of the software were you using to successfully produce PDF output?

If it was quite old I suspect some changes you made to the DITA OT are no longer compatible with newer versions of the DITA OT. You may need to adjust both the files being altered and the changes. Significant architectural changes were made to the DITA OT around versions 1.5 / 1.6 / 1.7 as well as many feature additions and bug fixes since then. If you are just dropping files you previously modified onto a newer copy of the DITA OT without testing and debugging those changes they might be ignored (at best) or they might break (worst case) the DITA OT.

If you suspect that is the case and you do not have a systematic record of what was altered (which files were altered and why) you would have to do a diff comparison between your altered files and the equivalent new files in the current version of the DITA OT and try to figure out if each change is needed, whether the altered file still exists, or has been subsequently modified to add a new feature or fix some bug (perhaps a bug you fixed in a different way), or other things.

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