Enfocus Community

Hi,
it often happens that certain special German characters such as umlauts (ä, ö, ü) in the names of spot colors are displayed with a hyphen in PitStop Inspector.
Such spot color names cannot be renamed to a different spot color name using the ‘Remap spot color’ action. Nothing happens, without an error message.
Why is this the case? And why can't PitStop rename or reassign the spot color name?
However, it works with the ‘Remap Color’ action. Strange.

Here is a an example file:
https://magentacloud.de/s/nCXZEmLJ7sKNknR

Hi,

I can reproduce. I will investigate internally.

Hi,

So it appears everything is "fine", let me explain. To be short, names as in spots names are internally converted to Numbers and later decoded to display a glyph. Based on the encoding (Ascii, UTF-8…), the glyph may change as you noticed.

The PDF Spec states that UTF-8 should be used but if the code is not valid in UTF-8, the spec provides no recommendations and that let vendors to decide. Regarding the character code for 0x8A, it will be translated as:

• MacRoman encoding says that 0x8A is ä (adieresis).

• WinAnsi encoding says that 0x8A is Š (Scaron)

• PDFDoc encoding says that 0x8A is − (U+2212 minus sign)

We do use PDFDoc encoding for "reading" names, hence the "-" replacement sign you noticed. We could use the MacRoman encoding so that the expected character is shown. But that would only be the case for Mac users.
Why is remapping working then? Be cause it uses the correct UTF-8 code when we do:
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+00E4

I am afraid there isn't much we can do here.