Has anyone ever solved the age old problem of special characters (such as an
apostrophe) not displaying properly when exporting from FHMX to a PDF file or
exporting to a .ps file then distilling through Distiller?
I?ve cleared the font cache (via font finagler) but still no luck.
Converting the text to paths is a last resort.

Okay, I?ve been doing further investigation into this matter. It appears the
omission of special characters when printing out of FH11 has to do with the
format of the font family as much as anything.
For example, when printing (or creating a PDF file) using the font Trade
Gothic as a Mac postscript format the special characters get omitted. But, when
I use Trade Gothic in an open type format, it prints fine. Things are heading
towards the open type format anyway, so this is good news.

I had similar issue. Resolved by: Print to .pdf file rather than export. Did not explore various font families though.
Just my 2?

as a matter of course we always convert all text to paths (and then save as pathed version, of course) prior to preparing pdf files.

It's the only safe way to go....