Special Characters cause preflight problems and are not found easily...

[Ray57]

Topic moved to here.

It may well happen that one inserts a special character without being aware of... this causing <Preflight Warning Your document has unresolved preflight errors>

The <Open Preflight> does nothing but closing the popup menu

When trying to find the culprit Publisher gives no help whatsoever for it obviously just shows the Font family... and interestingly it may show it as "OK". So no way of finding it in a long document. It is of help to toggle the visibility of Unicode Characters, which BTW is also not always working, here you need to select the text to find it... but it is somewhere in the wild... Toggling even inserts new additional characters as well.

And even if you manage that, it is still a PITA because now you have to scroll through dozens of pages and hope to find the unwanted(?) character(s).

Best

Ray

 

Publisher_SpecialCharsBug.afpub

[walt.farrell]

I do not get any Preflight errors about special characters with that .afpub document (but thanks for providing it).

When you do get the error, don't use the Font Manager. Double-click on the error message in the Preflight panel. Thus, what you need to figure out is why Open Preflight is not working for you.

What does your View > Studio menu show? If it doesn't show Preflight active, you might try activating it there. If it shows it as active, you  might try deactivating it, and activating it again.

Do you ever use multiple monitors, and if so are all of them currently active?

 

[Ray57]

Have you tried to print this document? Because that's what evokes the error on my side...

and yes, Preflight is active!

and NO, I don't use multiple monitors

But your question concerning the "Preflight Active or not" alone makes me wonder...
when I click <Open Preflight> in an error message, the very least I can expect is, that Publisher activates and opens it if it was set to active or not!
I mean, we run Apple, not Windows
 

BTW, I run it under MacOS 11.6.5 due to good reasons...

[walt.farrell]

16 minutes ago, Ray57 said:

Have you tried to print this document? Because that's what evokes the error on my side...

I get the same list of Preflight errors whether I try to Export, Print, or simply click on the Preflight icon in the Status Bar:

[Ray57]

why did you then previously state that you don't get any preflight error? ("I do not get any Preflight errors...")

The Missing Dictionary is nothing I worry about, although it is a bothering list because it tells all frames in which the same font(family) is used...

And that's what I find clumsy as well, it should at least be intuitive and easy to be edited the moment one forgot to assign a dictionary... but yet it isn't... as in almost all functions of Publisher (and Photo and Designer)... this is pretty unpractical to my mind (and compared to other programs...)
 

And WHY do you not stay with the real problem, the unwanted and hard to find special character which cause the problems?!
Neither the missing dictionaries nor the overflowing text frame are the reason for the error message!

And what about the weird habit of inserting further special character when clicking the <Toggle Unicode> button ?

These are the real questions I want to be answered

 

[walt.farrell]

I said

Quote

I do not get any Preflight errors about special characters

I still don't.

When I do get that error (in other files), the characters are easily found from the Preflight error messages by double-clicking on the message. So the solution I suggest for you if figuring out why you can't get that panel to show up. Perhaps you'll need to reset the studio.

30 minutes ago, Ray57 said:

Neither the missing dictionaries nor the overflowing text frame are the reason for the error message!

I don't get that error message about special characters. Not sure why.

30 minutes ago, Ray57 said:

And what about the weird habit of inserting further special character when clicking the <Toggle Unicode> button

I haven't looked into that yet.

[MEB]

Hi @Ray57,
The document you attached to this thread does not contain any missing character errors in Preflight. The file you attached to your previous thread (here) does contain one missing character error. I confirm the Preflight panel do not always highlight the error in the text frame in certain circumstances (not even the text frame itself). I'm logging this to be looked at, however it does display the Preflight panel for me when invoked through the button in the Preflight Warnings dialog when I try to export or print. I don't know why it didn't appear for you in your video above. Can you please try double-clicking the red icon in the status bar on bottom left after the page navigation area? Does it open the Preflight panel for you there? If not can you please go to menu View > Studio > Reset Studio and try again. Does it display now?

Regarding the Toggle Unicode, I haven't been able to reproduce what you are describing. In your video above however it seems to be working as expected. Note you must place the cursor at the end of the unicode or select the whole unicode to turn it again in to regular text.

[Old Bruce]

1 hour ago, MEB said:

Note you must place the cursor at the end of the unicode ... to turn it again in to regular text.

Cool, that will save me some time.

[Ray57]

On 5/12/2022 at 6:36 PM, MEB said:

Hi @Ray57,
The document you attached to this thread does not contain any missing character errors in Preflight. The file you attached to your previous thread (here) does contain one missing character error. I confirm the Preflight panel do not always highlight the error in the text frame in certain circumstances (not even the text frame itself). I'm logging this to be looked at, however it does display the Preflight panel for me when invoked through the button in the Preflight Warnings dialog when I try to export or print. I don't know why it didn't appear for you in your video above. Can you please try double-clicking the red icon in the status bar on bottom left after the page navigation area? Does it open the Preflight panel for you there? If not can you please go to menu View > Studio > Reset Studio and try again. Does it display now?

Regarding the Toggle Unicode, I haven't been able to reproduce what you are describing. In your video above however it seems to be working as expected. Note you must place the cursor at the end of the unicode or select the whole unicode to turn it again in to regular text.

Hi MEB,

so if I understand your feedback correctly it is "you are using it wrong"?

Seriously? One needs to know more on how to tackle errors as he needs to know about how to use the program? - </sarcasm>

The more I work with it the more it appears to me as a conglomerate of parts of code just glued together somehow... Coming from many years of QuarkExpress and then even more years of InDesign it gets more and more obvious that Publisher is a mess what stringency and intuitively is concerned.

And what I find even worse is, many things I'm looking for, I can't even find in the manual...
eg: where to edit the order of paragraph styles and how to define which paragraph style should come next (after a CR)... a hint is very much appreciated!

 

Back to the Unicode mess.
"Regarding the Toggle Unicode, I haven't been able to reproduce what you are describing. In your video above however it seems to be working as expected. Note you must place the cursor at the end of the unicode or select the whole unicode to turn it again in to regular text."

um... the Unicode Character (in my case) causes a preflight error! - Publisher does not find this very character which obviously shouldn't be there at all, so why should I want to turn it into regular (?) text again? I mean it was placed by... accident/chance/mistake... and caused problems...

And how to tackle the "missing dictionary for language..." ? No hint in the manual, it doesn't even find 'language' or 'dictionary'

Ray

 

[MEB]

Hi @Ray57,
I'm not sure where you did get the idea I said you were using it wrong. That wasn't the case. I did said the file attached to this thread does not contain any missing character errors in Preflight. At least I'm not seeing any reported in Preflight when I open it (video below). Are you seeing anything different when you open the file attached to his thread? If so please let me know.

 

 

So i tried with the file attached to the other thread (here) - which does contain one missing character error - to see if i could reproduce the problem. I did reproduce the issue (as I said) where the error were NOT being highlighted in the document when you double-click the Preflight error: I've double clicked several times the error in the Preflight panel in the beginning of the video below and it wasn't highlighting anything as you can see, not even the text frame. Only after switching to the Move tool, clicking elsewhere on canvas and trying again it did highlight the error when i double-clicked the error in the Preflight panel again. 

 

 

Regarding the Unicode Toggle not working as expected, in the video you attached above, it seems to be working as intended: the cursor was placed after the "e",  you enabled/toggle Unicode and it did show the code for that character then you toggled Unicode again and it displayed the letter/text "e" again as expected (unless I'm missing something - I did notice there was a couple codes in the document in that place already but I don't know how they did get there, it wasn't shown in the video so i ignored them). I did however noticed/reproduced some issues with the Toggle unicode not working today while recording the videos above. Apparently it does fail with some but not all characters (video below). I'm investigating this and logging the issue as well.  

 

If you are getting a missing character error in Preflight with the document attached to this thread can you please record a video showing the steps you are taking, the error in the Preflight panel and what happens when you double click it please? It's possible I'm missing something. Thanks for your help.

 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, MEB said:

Apparently it does fail with some but not all characters (video below). I'm investigating this and logging the issue as well.

That looks like Publisher doesn't want to create an invalid character when toggling from Unicode back to a glyph. You might try it with some other characters that aren't valid in the font.

Edit: And if so, that feels like correct behavior to me.