DHM

To clarify, all the fonts and weights and styles look fine in the Publisher project doc. They also look OK if I export text as curves. So it's clearly something to do with the process of PDF export. Interestingly though, I just tried a PDF export of some of the face variants from Photoshop and there's the same issue with the MEDIUM face of Montserrat. So this is weirder than I thought. I've done a complete uninstall and reinstall of the font downloading anew from Google a couple of times during all this and on one occassion it was ok for the entire Publisher doc export as PDF with actual text but on all the others it hasn't. And after that first time that it worked ok, all I did was come back to the file the following day, having rebooted the PC, did a bit more work on it and re-exported to test, and it all went garbled again. So now I have even less of a clue what the problem is. Something to do with the actual font? At the moment I just wish this wasn't the chosen brand font for this project!

We're not the only ones. I've found that exporting text to curves seems to make the text render OK. Initially I thought there were problems when viewing in Acrobat but I think it's the shitty render engine. If I import the PDF into Photoshop, the text as curves looks OK. I mean, it's really not a fix but it's probably what I'm going to have to do to get through this project.

I don't get how the font can render ok on one spread but not on the other 24 spreads when they're built from exactly the same master and styles

Hi Alfred - it's as per the attached

This is a nightmare. PDF export just mangles all the text - well not all of it, just most of it. Randomly it leaves bits ok even with exactly the same font, styles, colours, weights, and the same master objects applied - you can see in the screenshots one spread in the doc is ok and one is not (most aren;t) . Some headings are ok but body text is mashed. There's no logic to this, nothing consistent about why and how it fails. Publisher came out just in time for me to start these two jobs with a hard print deadline. After 2 - 3 days of arsing about trying to fix this problem after setting 120 pages, I thought I'd finally solved this by stopping using my FontBase font manager, removing all the Montserrat font versions and reinstalling them to system fonts and trying again for the upteenth time. So I started the other doc. But it's back again. The problem is, every time I do this reinstalling fonts process, the document seems to interpret the fonts as new fonts, substituting the old, then I have to go through and set everything again. Like hundreds of Latin names in italic in the body copy I will have to go through and manually do again and again, every time it happens. And many more issues besides will need to be addressed again. This is a real problem. I see someone else has it to - I commented on that thread days back but there's no response on there. This is Windows 10 Pro, Montserrat (Google font) - marked as fully embeddable. I tried turning off the subset option on exports dozens of times and it makes no difference. It's extended this job into days more than it should have been. I really like what you're trying to do with this suite of software but please please please get this sorted - people are trying to produce pro documents for print but we're falling at the last hurdle. It's pretty crashy too but the recovery so far has been reasonably good. Plenty of other niggles with things but the PDF export thing really really needs sorting though. Please can somebody look into this urgently?

Man I'm wasting so much time on this. I've typeset 116 pages using Montserrat font. Yesterday I spent hours trying to work out why most - but not all - of the text is garbled on PDF export. I stopped using Subset. I use FontBase font manager - I've tried disabling it - removing the fonts, reinstalling them, running them from the system fonts, from fontbase dir, getting them afresh from Google, all permutations. After about 2 hours yesterday I got it to export OK and although I didn't know exactly why, I was just relieved it was OK. This morning, I just reopened the same pub file and made a couple of tweaks to a picture frame, ran the export again and we're back to garbled text and me trying all the permutations again to solve it. Hours and hours wasted.