Question Mark chars

Aspose.Words Product Family
1

Hi, I just upgraded Aspose.Total to try to get rid of the question mark characters as described here - Aspose generated PDF contains odd question mark characters - but they are still appearing. Can you tell me how to get rid of them? Thanks.

2

Hi Ralph,

Thanks for your inquiry. Please make sure you have all the fonts installed on the machine you’re performing Word to PDF conversions. Aspose.Words performs fonts substitution during rendering a document. So, if the font is not available when the document is rendered, it will be replaced with an alternative font.
https://docs.aspose.com/words/net/using-truetype-fonts/

Also, please attach your input Word document, output PDF file showing the undesired behavior and related fonts here for testing. We will investigate the issue on our end and provide you more information.

Best regards,

3

Hi,
Here are the Word and PDF documents. You can see the question mark characters in page 14 of the PDF (3rd column has a lot). The font is Calibri which is installed on the server. The characters are LineFeeds, I think.
Thanks!

4

Hi Ralph,

Thanks for your inquiry. I converted your document to PDF format using Aspose.Words for .NET 14.4.0 and attached it here for your reference. I could not see any issue with this output PDF document, could you please clarify where the issue is? Please create screenshot which highlight the problematic areas in PDF and attach it here for our reference. What PDF viewer are you currently using on your side?

Best regards,

5

Here attached is a screenshot showing both the Acrobat version info and some of the question mark characters CIRCLED IN RED. They were also in the PDF I uploaded earlier.

How can I find out if I am actually using the 14.4.0 version of Aspose.Words? Maybe I did not install it or change the reference correctly. I am using the new license you provided though. Shouldn’t that only work with the new version?

I never found any upgrade instructions to follow, so I just ran the MSI and re-referenced the DLLs from inside Visual Studio. How can I verify the version? Thanks.

6

Hi Ralph,

Thanks for your inquiry. Aspose.Words for .NET is just a class library. You can simply remove old reference from your project using Visual Studio and then add reference to latest Aspose.Words dll from a .NET Project.

You can dynamically check if you’re referencing the correct DLL by using the following code snippet:

System.Reflection.Assembly[] assemblies = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.GetAssemblies();
foreach(System.Reflection.Assembly assembly in assemblies)
{
    System.Reflection.AssemblyName assemblyName = assembly.GetName();
    if (assemblyName.Name.Contains("Aspose.Words"))
        Console.WriteLine("Aspose.Words Version Number: " + assemblyName.Version.ToString());
}

To check version of the library, right click on the dll, select Properties from the context menu, then select Version tab. You will see File version.

Moreover, the PDF document you attached here was actually created using Aspose.Words for .NET 14.3.0. Please do the following steps to check it:

  • Open your PDF document with Adobe Acrobat
  • Click on the ‘File’ menu and choose ‘Properties’ to open ‘Document Properties’ dialogue box.
  • In the ‘Decsription’ tab, under ‘Advanced’ section, you’ll see ‘Pdf Producer’ name.

Secondly, the license files come with an expiry date which determines what versions of Aspose.Words you can use. For example, considering the following expiry:

<SubscriptionExpiry>20140218</SubscriptionExpiry>

It means that you can not use latest version as it was published on 20140505, however, with this license you can use any version of Aspose.Words i.e. released before the 20140218 expiry date.

If we can help you with anything else, please feel free to ask.

Best regards,

7

Hi Again,

It looks like I am still using 14.3.0.0.

I am attaching a confusing screenshot, but in there it appears that the .msi install did not update the .dll to 14.4.0

Thoughts?

8

Hi Ralph,

Thanks for your inquiry. Running the installer of the latest version should update old Aspose.Words.dll on your machine. Alternatively, please uninstall old version of Aspose.Words from your machine by going to Control Panel | Programs and Features and then install new version using .msi. After confirming that the new dlls (14.4.0) are in place, please add reference to it from Visual Studio. I hope, this helps.

Best regards,

9

Hello, I did the uninstall from Control Panel, reinstalled from the MSI noted above. I removed the references from .Net and then re-added them. I am still showing PDF Producer: Aspose.Words for .NET 14.3.0.0 in Acrobat. And the question mark boxes are still in the PDF.

For Words and Cells I added the reference to the .Net 2.0 version. Is that correct? I thought I remembered that for .Net 4.0 I am supposed to use the net2.0 and not 3.5 version. Is that the problem?

10

I just removed the bin\net2.0 reference and added it back in from bin\net3.5_Client Profile (see attached). I got tame result in the PDF. Still 14.3.0.0 with bad characters. Any other suggestions? Thanks!

11

Hi Ralph,

Thanks for your inquiry. Please try creating a new Project from scratch using Visual Studio, add reference to 14.4.0 in it and see how it goes. I have also attached a simple project here for your reference. Also, please refer to the “bin/readme.txt” file to learn what these assemblies in different folders are all about.

Best regards,

12

Hi, I created a new .Net project and opened a .doc and resaved it as a .PDF, and Adobe Reader still reports it as PDF Producer: Aspose.Words for .NET 14.3.0.0.

So, somehow I have the wrong .dll installed in C:\Program Files (x86)\Aspose\Aspose.Words for .NET\bin\net3.5_ClientProfile?

Can we do a shared session where you might be able to verify the Aspose.Total installation?

13

It seems like the wrong version of Aspose.Words is packaged with Aspose.Total.

How about if I download the Words installer only, and install that over 14.3.0.0? I can do that without uninstalling the rest of Aspose.Total, right?

14

Hi Ralph,

Thanks for your inquiry.

We compile Aspose.Total for .NET on a daily basis to ensure that it contains the most up to date versions of each of our .NET components. I checked the most recent Aspose.Total for .NET.msi and was unable to reproduce this problem. It contains the correct assembly i.e. 14.4.0. Alternatively, please download/install Aspose.Words for .NET 14.4.0 separately from the following link:
https://releases.aspose.com/words/net

I hope, this helps.

Unfortunately, the main avenue of technical support is through our forums. Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance.

Best regards,

15

Hi, well the good news is I downloaded & reinstalled Aspose.Words ONLY, and now I do have ver. 14.4.0.0 running. The bad news is I am still getting the Question Mark characters in the Word saved-as-PDF document.

Please see the 3 attachments. There is a .jpg with those characters circled and showing the PDF Producer version. And I am attaching the Word document, and the PDF it was saved as, where the characters in question (…) appear.

Thanks for more help to come!

16

Hi Ralph,

Thanks for your inquiry. These ‘?’ characters are actually LineFeed character; and saving to PDF format using Microsoft Word 2013 causes the same problem. However, I was still unable to reproduce this issue on my end when using Aspose.Words for .NET 14.4.0 on Windows 7 machine (please see attached PDFs). What OS and .Net framework versions are you getting this problem on?

Best regards,

17

Yes, I had identified them as LineFeeds in my posting on 5/6/2014. I am using Visual Studio 2010, and it is a Windows Server 2008.

I tried saving the Word doc as a PDF using Word 2007 and I also got the ‘?’ characters.

At this point I’d like to know if we can get a refund of our $1500 upgrade of Aspose.Total, because we only did the upgrade to resolve this problem. I stated that in my posting on 5/3.

Can we get a refund? Thanks.

18

Hi Ralph,

Thanks for the additional information.

We do understand that this issue is important to you, however, it seems the issue only occurs when using .DOC format. To confirm this, please try saving your “District681-052414-033133LCAP.doc” as .DOCX format using Microsoft Word 2013 (a similar .docx is attached with this post for your reference “District681-052414-033133LCAP.docx”). Now, when you convert this “District681-052414-033133LCAP.docx” to PDF format either by using Microsoft Word 2013 or by using Aspose.Words for .NET 14.4.0, the problem gets resolved. So, can you please try running the following code on your end and see if it resolves this problem for you?

Document doc = new Document(MyDir + "District681-052414-033133LCAP.doc");
MemoryStream docxStream = new MemoryStream();
doc.Save(docxStream, SaveFormat.Docx);
Document docx = new Document(docxStream);
docx.Save(MyDir + "out.pdf");

Best regards,

19

Great, thanks for that solution. I had also discovered a code-around solution which is to apply the following replace command to each string being written that may contain the LineFeeds:

s = s.Replace(Chr(10), Chr(13)) : s = s.Replace(Chr(13) & Chr(13), Chr(13))

But your interim Save as Docx is easier and safer.

20

Hi Ralph,

Thanks for your feedback. In case you have further inquires or need any help, please let us know.

Best regards,