PDFs - Blank Pages

This forum is for all Flare issues related to PDF, eBook, Microsoft Word, Adobe FrameMaker, XPS, and XHTML book targets.
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GeorgeBell
Sr. Propeller Head
Posts: 114
Joined: Thu Nov 22, 2012 3:27 am

PDFs - Blank Pages

Post by GeorgeBell »

Came across a nasty one which had us baffled.

After compiling a PDF and viewing the output on screen, we occasionally would come across a random blank page. It was as if it was being displayed with a white font.

MadCap could not replicate, until........ They saw it happen on my system.

However, Adobe Reader, Google Chrome and other browsers including IE would display it correctly.

But then we realised that on our systems, Flare was calling up Microsoft Edge, and that's where pages would appear blank.

MadCap now have a sample file of 130 pages with 10 blanks for further investigation.

You have been warned.
kerimucci
Propeller Head
Posts: 59
Joined: Thu Nov 02, 2017 3:38 am

Re: PDFs - Blank Pages

Post by kerimucci »

Hello,

Do you know if this has been addressed? I am having this issue right now.
GeorgeBell
Sr. Propeller Head
Posts: 114
Joined: Thu Nov 22, 2012 3:27 am

Re: PDFs - Blank Pages

Post by GeorgeBell »

Yes, I did find a cause and a solution, but it took a lot of time, not to mention persistence. I was fortunate in that I could use on a separate system. This allowed me to do a gradual search and replace to establish which particular Style was causing the problem.

I'll quote what I hope are relevant parts of the exchange with MacCap.

(MCap) After much troubleshooting, we have found that the issue has to do with the use of the font family "Arial Unicode MS." This font family is set over 70 times throughout the stylesheet. Once we removed all references to this font, the output shows correct in Edge. We did not see any difference in the output's font styling when all of these references were removed.

In my reply next, please note that I was working on the "PRINT" section of the .css

(Me) I appear to have narrowed it down to 6 changes of print Styles "Font Family" where it now just has "Arial". These are:

b
body
caption
div
h2 -- NoNewPage
Madcap|slideshowCaption

[GB - Finally!] I changed the Font Family of the "b" Style in the print section of the DuxHelp.css to Arial, recompiled, and the blank pages are no more in Edge. :-)

I still have not established if this is a Flare or Edge problem, but suspect the latter.
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