Mike Nosal

I use Designer with Cricut DS. You need to select "Flatten Transforms". Use 72dpi to keep the size correct when importing into Design Space. When you go to Make your design, Cricut Design Space will still try to ungroup and relayout your objects in a way that conserves paper, moving and fitting them closer together. If you need to keep objects in exact alignment and position, then you should select them and select "Layer > Geometry > Merge Curves" before exporting. You can do this even with objects that are not touching or overlapping and Cricut DS will cut them in that exact position and orientation. You can still easily select "Layer > Geometry > Separate Curves" in Designer if you need to make adjustments and then do Merge Curves again before exporting. Also note that for text like this, you want to Add the curves together, so Cricut doesn't try cutting overlapping letters individually. (Look at the overlap of the L and M) Hope this helps.

Export settings were the same between the two apps. I've tried multiple presets on Publisher but none of them seem to solve this issue. Likewise, choosing different PDF presets in Designer doesn't seem to alter its behavior either. This occurs if I create the text frame in a Designer .afdesign file and open and export it from Publisher, or if I create a new document in Publisher and add the frame text there.

I've found an issue related to Text Frame export to PDF support between Publisher and Designer (Mac/2.5.7). In Affinity Designer, create a text frame and enter enough text so that it wraps inside the box on to multiple lines. Export from Designer to PDF. When I open the PDF and use a screen reader (Apple VoiceOver) to read the contents of the PDF, it reads the text box as one complete sentence. Open the same document in Publisher and export to PDF. The exported PDF looks the same, but now the screen reader sees the contents of the text frame as separate lines. This makes the PDF much worse for accessibility as it forces the user to navigate line by line, while the PDF exported by Designer is read as a single block. Is there a way to force Publisher to export those multi-line text frames as one block the way Designer does?

Designer 2.5.7 does not currently support adding alt-text to images. Publisher does support adding alt-text to images via the Tags panel, and the exported PDF will include that text. This is necessary to provide alt-text in PDFs which meets accessibility requirements (the alt-text is accessible by the screen reader.) Designer does NOT support the alt-text when exporting to PDF, even if opened and added in Publisher, and there is no way to add alt-text in Designer. Publisher's PDF export dialog includes a "Tagged PDF" checkbox which is absent in Designer. Can alt-text Tags support be added to export to PDF in Designer?