Issues with special characters in titles in PDF/UA-1 mode

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rjcbop
Posts: 56
Joined: Wed Aug 08, 2018 10:23 pm

Issues with special characters in titles in PDF/UA-1 mode

Post by rjcbop »

We generate PDF's with a customized version of the DITA-OT PDF2 plug-in, specifying PDF/UA-1 mode (in a customized version of the fop.xconf file) so that we generate PDF's that are 508 compliant. Our transform was failing whenever there was a registered trademark symbol in a title element of a topic and we've tracked that down to an issue with the font-mappings.xml file. Specifically, the version of font-mappings.xml that's distributed with the DITA-OT (we're on the version that's distributed with Oxygen 24.0) maps superscripts in titles (which applies to registered trademarks in titles) to the physical fonts Helvetica and Arial Unicode MS, neither of which is installed on our Windows 10 Enterprise machines. This caused our transform to fail.

We fixed the issue by creating a customized version of the font-mappings.xml file and specifying Arial for the physical font to use for superscripts in titles (which use the Sans logical font), as in the following snippet under the Sans logical font section of the file:
<physical-font char-set="SymbolsSuperscript">
<font-face>Arial</font-face>
<baseline-shift>20%</baseline-shift>
<override-size>smaller</override-size>
</physical-font>

We're posting this fix in case anyone else encounters this issue.