why are a mixture of characters in the PDF out in Japanese?

[Mohinda]

We have to supply online help and PDF in Japanese. The characters in the Online help are fine. The PDF created from the Japanese help has a mixture of bold and normal characters. We are using Segoe UI font. Does any one know what is causing this behaviour?

[techwriter31]

What version of Lingo are you using?

[Mohinda]

Sorry for a very delayed reply.
We are using Lingo 4. I reported this issue to MadCap Support. I have been informed that it is a bug and it will be fixed in the next release of Lingo. The bug reference is #34732.

[techwriter31]

No problem! Was this particular font type causing the problem? We've had some problems using Flare with specific true type fonts (in our case it was a Frutiger font - a bug was filed).

For our Japanese PDF outputs, we're currently using an IPAPGothic font and haven't had any problems with bolding. This font was chosen because when English text is present in the document, it appears similar to Arial (we needed a single font that could be used when there is a mix of English and Japanese text). For our Japanese web-based outputs, we just use Arial.

[Mohinda]

We are using Segoe UI font for our English online help and PDF. After translation of Flare Project into Japanese we have not changed the font. It is the same as English. This could be the possible cause of the problem. I will try the Japanese font and see if the the problem gets resolved. Thanks for your input.

[techwriter31]

Not sure if this helps, but I created language-specific stylesheets for all the languages we translate to and simply reference the standard English stylesheet via import. So, the langugage-specific stylesheet only contains the differences between the two. This way, we can include translated autotext in the translated stylesheets and can modify the font for each particular language so that it automatically appears correctly for these projects. We just instruct the translation vendor to use the translated stylesheet as the master stylesheet for these projects. This also saves a little on translation costs because our autotext is only translated once.

This also allows you to make changes based on documentation standards for a particular language. For example, our Japanese reviewers insist that we don't include italics anywhere in the Japanese translations, but our translation vendor often includes italics in the translation. To get around this problem, in the Japanese stylesheet I set the font style to normal for the italic character style. This way, there will never be italics in the document and is less of a burden on the the translation vendor.