smurphy – Page 22 – Tech, writing, and tech writing

Disappearing text in PDFs – Part 1

There’s little more frustrating than finishing writing a lengthy document, with minutes to go to a deadline, clicking Save as PDF with a heavy sigh of relief that everything’s finally done, then opening the final PDF for a last once-over before drawing a line under the project, only to discover that – GAH! – a bunch of text is missing! But it was there the last 20 times you generated draft PDFs! What’s happened?

I’ve had text disappear from PDFs mysteriously twice in the last year, both with different causes and solutions, and I had a heck of a time trying to find a solution both times. This post is on the most recent, and more obscure, problem.

I was working on a FrameMaker document that contained a series of tables of data. All had gone swimmingly through several iterations of the draft document, but when I generated the final PDF for publication, the text from the first cell had disappeared in 80% of the tables. Odd.

I saved again with the same result. Still missing. I rebooted my machine and tried again, still missing. Updated my software, still missing. I checked the help but couldn’t find a description of my problem. Not even google could help me out. This was getting annoying.

I went back to the dud PDF and discovered that if I tried to select the missing text in the affected cells, I could copy and paste it from the PDF to a text file, so it was actually there, just invisible.

So, probably a font issue? I modified the text properties to use a different font, different size, different colour. Nada. I edited the PDF settings in Acrobat Distiller to embed all fonts all the time, never substitute fonts, increase the resolution, decrease the resolution… You name it, I tried it, but the cell contents remained obstinately invisible.

Back in the source files, I tried recreating tables and changing font settings, but nothing worked.

Finally, I gave up my investigations, grabbed a cuppa and vented at a colleague. He described a similar problem he’d had when working in PowerPoint. In that instance, a background had rendered in front of the content on saving to PDF, so to fix the problem he selected the background and sent it to back in the source file. Food for thought.

I decided to check out the table properties in FrameMaker, and there it was: row backgrounds were set to white. But the page was already white, so I could safely remove that. I set the background to None instead for the affected tables, saved as PDF one more time, and my invisible content reappeared. Huzzah!

Still no idea why the problem affected first content cells only, or only a random subset of the tables in the document, but if I ever encounter disappearing content in table cells again, I’ll be checking out my cell background properties first.

A completely different cause of and solution to text disappearing when FrameMaker files were saved as PDFs is covered here.

Book Review: Windows 7 Inside Out, Deluxe Edition by Ed Bott, Carl Siechert, Craig Stinson; O’Reilly Media

Book Cover - Windows 7 Inside and Out Once again, I’ve gone and selected a monster tome from O’Reilly to review on their Blogger Review Program. And once again, after months wading through it, I’m impressed.

I’ve owned a few Inside Out volumes over the years, so had high expectations, and I wasn’t disappointed. Whatever you want to know about using Windows 7, you’ll find it in here.

Novices can start with Part 1 which introduces the OS, goes through installation and basic configuration, explains how to find your way around, personalise your settings, add and remove programs and the like. The sections then delve progressively deeper into the nuts and bolts of Windows 7, all nicely divvied up according to what you might be trying to do in particular: organize your content, backup/restore, share media, set up a home network… Experts can skip towards the back of the book for the finer points of networking, security and tuning your system for optimised performance. Every section details the variations you can expect between different versions of Windows 7, so it really is a one-size-fits-all solution. If you’re on Starter at home and Ultimate in the office, it’s all covered here.

Even after more than a decade and a half using Windows, there was stuff in here for me to learn, and I might be kidding myself, but I’m almost positive my laptop has been more responsive and less badly behaved since I worked through some of the tuning tips.

Highly recommended to users of Windows at all levels.

You can find out more about the book and order it direct from O’Reilly here.

Bus Time Dublin App

I love the new signs at the Dublin Bus stops that list the next N busses and tell you how long it’ll be till they arrive. The only thing better than them is the free Bus Time Dublin iThing app I recently discovered.

What it does:

Uses GPS to figure out your current location and tell you what bus stops are nearby, as a list or on a map as you prefer.
Lets you search for bus stops by street name or bus stop number, if you have that information.
Lets you add particular bus stops to a list of Favourites for convenience.
Shows a much longer list of imminent busses than the signs at the stops, and shows data for stops that don’t even have the new signs.

What it doesn’t do:

Tell you which stop a given bus goes from.
Tell you which bus goes where you want to go.
Tell you the intermediate stops on any route.

But if you’re already in posession of this information, then this app makes the actual catching of busses that bit more efficient – 10 more minutes gossiping by the water cooler (or clocking up billable time, if you’re the more driven type) instead of standing in the rain. It’s all good.

Accessing Geographically-Restricted Web Sites

So – hot on the heels of yesterday’s post on TV-less TV, here’s something I coincidentally discovered yesterday, courtesy of a post by Graham Linehan on an episode of the Daily Show that couldn’t be shown on UK TV.

Modify Headers is a free Firefox add-on that allows you to edit the HTTP request headers you send to web servers while browsing. Ostensibly, it’s intended for testing web sites to see how they respond to specific requests, but it is possible to use it to access some geographically-restricted content, such as on-demand TV programming.

Note: This worked on some sites I tried, but not on others, so results aren’t guaranteed. Maybe I was picking bad IP addresses, or maybe the sites in question have a way of checking if this add-on is in use.

To use the Modify Headers add-on:

Install Firefox if you don’t already have it.
Download and install the Modify Headers add-on.
Restart Firefox.
In Firefox, select Tools | Modify Headers.
In the dialog box that appears:
1. From the Select Action drop-down, select Add.
2. In the Header Name field, enter X-Forwarded-For.
3. In the Header Value field, enter an IP address appropriate to the country you want to pretend you’re from (12.13.14.15 worked as a US address for me).
4. Click Add.
  Your header is added to the list area.
Repeat step 5 as many times as necessary to set up headers for each country you want to pretend you’re in.
Before browsing to restricted content, turn the appropriate header on and the others off.
Enabled headers have a green dot at the end of the row in the list area; disabled ones have a red dot.
To change a header’s status, double-click that header’s row.
Leave the Modify Headers dialog box open! Your modified headers are only sent while the dialog box is open.
Browse to the geographically-restricted content you want to view, and away you go (hopefully!).

TV Without a TV

BBC’s Global iPlayer app for iPad launched today – hooray! It’s a free app, but requires an in-app subscription to access anything beyond demo content. Subs are €6.99 per month, or €49.99 for the year. A nice touch is that you can download episodes to watch later when you’re offline – handy for commuters, holiday makers and the like. The selection is good, but could be, and hopefully will be, improved. Most noticeable gap for me is the dearth of good children’s programming – virtually the only channels we watch on traditional-format telly these days are Cbeebies and CBBC, and it would be great to be able to stick a few of their programs on the iPad for the kids to watch when we’re on the move. BBC iPlayer can be accessed through a web browser on a regular computer here – TV programs aren’t accessible outside the UK, but many excellent radio programs are.

Note: I tried accessing the BBC iPlayer Radio site through Safari on the iPad and iPhone, but on the iPad got an error that I had to switch from 3G to WiFi for it to work (3G wasn’t turned on), and on the iPhone got an error that I was outside the UK, although that’s not a problem when I access from my laptop, so I guess the site doesn’t play well with iThing browsers.

While I was enjoying the BBC iPlayer app, I decided to install the 4oD Catch Up app too. Although the blurb says it doesn’t work outside the UK, I’m watching an episode of Spaced (comedy gold) through it as I type and it’s working fine. You can watch 4oD in a regular web browser here.

ITV don’t have an iThing app yet, but have a web-based player here. (Doesn’t work from Safari on iThings.) Content is only available in the UK, though.

And last, but not least, RTÉ also lack an app, but have a web-based player here. (Again, doesn’t work from Safari on iThings.) A limited selection of their programming is accessible internationally. Aside from News programming, I’ve barely looked at RTÉ live since they launched their Player. It must be getting popular, as they’ve started including ads in many (/all?) of the programs now, which was a rarity when they launched.

So there we go – welcome to the future – TV on demand, without a TV – hooray!