Chinese "Contents" and "Index" titles do not display in pdf

[Fa]

Hi,

I'm generating manuals in pdf format using XMetaL Enterprise Edition 5.5.

The orginal English manuals look just fine, and so do the translations in various languages (FR, ES, DE, etc.).

As for Chinese, I have managed to fix some issues, but the last one leaves me puzzled.

In all other languages, the words “Content” and “Index” (or their respective translations) appear in several places as follows:

Content: 1) as a title on top of the page where the Table of Content starts, 2) in the pdf bookmarks and 3) in the even and odd header of the TOC pages.

Index: 1) as a title on top of the page where the Index starts, 2) in the pdf bookmarks, 3) in the even and odd header of the Index pages and 4) at the end of the table of contents, where the Index page number is indicated.

But in the Chinese version, although I get 1) and 2) for both (so it retrieves correctly the term from my zh_CN file), 3) does not show, and the same goes for 4) (where the page number is indicated but the dots preceding it start from the beginning of the line).

Anyone knows where this issue could originate?

Thank you!

Fabien

EDIT: the exact XMetaL version numer is 5.5.0.219, and it's running on Windows XP.

Reply

[pmasal]

Could be the font you're using doesn't support Chinese characters.
Did you try Arial-Unicode-MS?

Reply

[Fa]

Thanks Paul,

It could very well be. But since both these items are hierarchically on the same level as the other main parts in the manual (at least Index appears to be so in the table of content of manuals in other languages), I assumed it would use the same font (i.e. the font assigned to topic.title in the custom.xls file).

Are the attributes for Content and Index set somewhere else?

Fabien

Reply

[pmasal]

As an example, the TOC title uses the “Table of Contents” variable value, which is set in toc.xsl. It uses the attributes of topic.title, but we usually format that with AvantGarde fonts, which do not support double-byte characters. So we do conditionals like this:

  Arial Unicode MS
ArialCyr
MSGothic AvantGarde

Just a suggestion, this works for us…
Paul Masalsky

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[Fa]

Thanks Paul, but after investigating a little further, I have found where the error originates: the TOC header font family had been changed to Arial in the toc-attr.xsl file. I now got the TOC and Index headings to display as other titles, but I'm still struggling with the Index entry in the TOC that does not appear. It's probably still a font issue, but I don't know where to fix it.

I have also noticed that in the pdf document bookmarks, titles that are on the same level are not displayed with the same font. Has anyone has encountered a similar issue before?

Regards,

Fabien

Reply

[mzwecker]

Just yesterday I made my first Chinese pdf3 outputs due to a new customer requirement.
My simplified Chinese came out fine, but my Traditional came out without the TOC and Index text. 

I have not had time to investigate, but I'll be following this thread and will post anything that I learn once I have time to investigate.

Reply

[mzwecker]

I finally found some time to play with this, and the problem seems to have been a simple one.

I did not have a proper zh_TW vars file in ..SoftQuadXMetaL SharedDITA_OTdemoxmfocfgcommonvars

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