benwiggy

Call me crazy, but what about showing an accurately rendered PDF, displayed on the page? Like InDesign does. Like Pages does. Like Word does. Like Uncle Bob's BrochureMaker™ and every other app in the world does.

Call me crazy, but what about showing an accurately rendered PDF, displayed on the page? Like InDesign does. Like Pages does. Like Word does. Like Uncle Bob's BrochureMaker™ and every other app in the world does.

Does the company have a blog where they might explain why, when they came to design the Affinity suite of apps, they elected to choose such an absurd and largely unhelpful model for the handling of PDFs? 

This seems like a rather curious decision...

Does the company have a blog where they might explain why, when they came to design the Affinity suite of apps, they elected to choose such an absurd and largely unhelpful model for the handling of PDFs? 

Call me crazy, but what about showing an accurately rendered PDF, displayed on the page? Like InDesign does. Like Pages does. Like Word does. Like Uncle Bob's BrochureMaker™ and every other app in the world does.

Call me crazy, but what about showing an accurately rendered PDF, displayed on the page? Like InDesign does. Like Pages does. Like Word does. Like Uncle Bob's BrochureMaker™ and every other app in the world does.

Test this PDF, made in Aff Publisher. It contains Non-lining figures in several different Adobe / Monotype fonts. -- Caslon, Garamond, Baskerville, Bembo, etc.  

They are all outlined in Illustrator, because they are alternate glyphs that can't be mapped back. If you claim that these fonts are 'wrong', then almost every font is wrong and we can't use any of them. Or, the application should work with fonts as they are. 
That is what Illustrator does, by outlining the glyphs. That is what Affinity should be doing. 

Instead, Affinity imports this PDF and switches in the default glyphs.

Figures.pdf

 

Affinity cannot handle the fi and fl ligatures in this PDF. 
Untitled Project 1.pdf
Also: create a PDF in Affinity Publisher that contains Small Caps, Non-lining numerals, Swash Italics, and other OTF variants.
Then import the PDF back in. Results can vary form font to font, but even using Adobe / Monotype fonts, e.g. Minion, Kepler, Garamond, there are problems.

These have been reported many times.

There are several posts on the Designer and Photo forums requesting some sort of Automation, so I thought I'd echo the sentiment here.
It would be great to see the Affinity Suite using AppleScript, or JavaScript or Lua. Or python!   (Assuming I'm not missing something!)
There are many people who are dependent on Adobe because of the scripting capabilities.

At the very least, importing IDML files is a must. Scribus and VivaDesigner both do this, and it's the only way to get punters to switch, if they've got legacy documents.

I use Dorico, which exports to PDF or SVG natively. Neither of these formats works well in Affinity. Converting the PDF to pages of EPS files (with embedded fonts!) does seem to work well. But of course, you need a tool to do that. 

I also use Richard Koch's MacOS installer package for GhostScript, not because I don't like the CLI, but because I don't like both MacPorts and Homebrew! 🤣

For those on a Mac, once you have GhostScript installed, you can make a little Automator application that will outline any PDF that you drop onto it.


Here's the text to copy and paste.
for f in "$@" do # Sanitize filename and save with new name f=${f//\\} filename="${f%.*}" filename="$filename"" NoFonts.pdf" /usr/local/bin/gs \     -dNOPAUSE \     -dBATCH \     -dNoOutputFonts \     -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \     -sOutputFile="$filename" \     "$f" echo $f, $filename done

 

This argument about font licensing is entirely irrelevant.
Does Adobe wave legal warnings at you when you open a PDF in Photoshop as a bitmap? No. It just rasters it accurately. As does any other image editing program, including open source apps.

When you open a PDF in Illustrator, it says "some of this font data will be outlined" if you haven't got the font installed, and it displays all the correct shapes accurately regardless. As does Inkscape, Graphic, or any other vector drawing app.

When you place a PDF on a page in InDesign, Quark XPress, Scribus, VivaDesigner, Pages, Word, Finale, or any other app: it displays the PDF accurately and lets you print it.

This is not an esoteric legal obstacle for Serif. Opening, displaying, printing and editing a PDF are all entirely lawful activities, performed a million times a day. (What is not permitted is 'reverse engineering' the font data to create a working version of the font.)

This argument about font licensing is entirely irrelevant.
Does Adobe wave legal warnings at you when you open a PDF in Photoshop as a bitmap? No. It just rasters it accurately. As does any other image editing program, including open source apps.

When you open a PDF in Illustrator, it says "some of this font data will be outlined" if you haven't got the font installed, and it displays all the correct shapes accurately regardless. As does Inkscape, Graphic, or any other vector drawing app.

When you place a PDF on a page in InDesign, Quark XPress, Scribus, VivaDesigner, Pages, Word, Finale, or any other app: it displays the PDF accurately and lets you print it.

This is not an esoteric legal obstacle for Serif. Opening, displaying, printing and editing a PDF are all entirely lawful activities, performed a million times a day. (What is not permitted is 'reverse engineering' the font data to create a working version of the font.)

PDF import is the Achilles' Heel of the Affinity Suite. Anything that uses text glyphs in complex ways --  ligatures, glyph variants, OpenType features -- cannot be relied upon to display correctly. Notation software such as Sibelius uses fonts for many of the symbols, as you will know. 
The 1.8 update seems to be a bit better than before, but there are still problems.  

The official line is that it's not a bug, but that importing PDFs with embedded fonts (i.e. all print-compliant PDFs) is 'not supported'.

What's most curious is that Affinity will import EPS files of essentially the same data perfectly. So that's one workaround.

PDF import:

EPS import:


The other solution is to "Outline" all text in the PDF. This means converting the text data into 'raw' vector line and curve data. There should be no loss of quality, but you need a software tool that can do it. Most Adobe software can do it (but then you wouldn't be here!). The command-line PDF tool GhostScript can do it, with the suitable incantation:
 
/usr/local/bin/gs \     -dNOPAUSE \     -dBATCH \     -dNoOutputFonts \     -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \     -sOutputFile="OutputFilename" \        <inputFilename>
Also: Mountain Lion? You're lucky Affinity works at all, as that's below the minimum system requirements (10.9 Mavericks).  You should be able to run El Capitan (10.11), even on the oldest hardware.

PDF import is the Achilles' Heel of the Affinity Suite. Anything that uses text glyphs in complex ways --  ligatures, glyph variants, OpenType features -- cannot be relied upon to display correctly. Notation software such as Sibelius uses fonts for many of the symbols, as you will know. 
The 1.8 update seems to be a bit better than before, but there are still problems.  

The official line is that it's not a bug, but that importing PDFs with embedded fonts (i.e. all print-compliant PDFs) is 'not supported'.

What's most curious is that Affinity will import EPS files of essentially the same data perfectly. So that's one workaround.

PDF import:

EPS import:


The other solution is to "Outline" all text in the PDF. This means converting the text data into 'raw' vector line and curve data. There should be no loss of quality, but you need a software tool that can do it. Most Adobe software can do it (but then you wouldn't be here!). The command-line PDF tool GhostScript can do it, with the suitable incantation:
 
/usr/local/bin/gs \     -dNOPAUSE \     -dBATCH \     -dNoOutputFonts \     -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \     -sOutputFile="OutputFilename" \        <inputFilename>
Also: Mountain Lion? You're lucky Affinity works at all, as that's below the minimum system requirements (10.9 Mavericks).  You should be able to run El Capitan (10.11), even on the oldest hardware.

AFAI remember it's part of some Swift code examples from the Big Nerd Ranch. - You can try out if the below Mac GrafDemo.app related file works for you ...

GrafDemo.app.zip Copy the GrafDemo.app into your "username/Applications/" folder. - You can use copy/paste (cmd-c/cmd-v) of text from any texteditor to insert/change text etc. 

Well there is of course a format difference between PS, EPS and PDF, though hacking and running/viewing real Postscript code on OSX isn't difficult and supported to some degree. A little MacOS PS Interpreter ...

 

Just to add this. There is also a standard macOS ghostscript installer available, created by Richard Koch, University of Oregon:
https://pages.uoregon.edu/koch/
For people who don’t like to go through the command line. 😀

There are two points here:
Firstly, I'm seeing errors in placed PDFs even when I have all the necessary fonts installed. 
Secondly, PDFs can be placed correctly in InDesign, Illustrator, XPress, Apple Pages, MS Word, etc etc, even if the correct fonts are not installed on your system.
 
Affinity's ability to turn PDFs into editable content is welcome, but the ability to place a PDF on a page as an 'image', accurately,  is paramount to a DTP app. 

Thats a good suggestion, but for now we just keep Indesign for our main paper, and use Affinity designer for our per ad solution. (it´s just so much better to work in affinity, the snaping is butter smooth and everything breaths creativity, too bad it doesnt have the option to import/place pdf as uneditable pdfs with all fonts intact). 

Looking forward to better workarounds and/or future updates from Serif. This should be their no 1 priority, in my opinion. 

What about PDF import?
The problem with native import not solved again? Why do the developers understand that Publisher is not suitable for professional use without this feature? Any external ad that appears in flyers / brochures / booklets / magazines becomes a problem. None of the layouters will deal with the installation of the countless fonts.
Too bad, it's a great program, unfortunately currently only for hobby area.

Just wanted to chime in here with @benwiggy that I continue to have the same problems with Affinity on imported PDFs. (In fact, I'm guessing from the same source applications.) I am usually simply trying to rearrange elements on the page, or hide certain elements from being printed. I'm not actually even editing the text, but just opening the file destroys anything that uses a ligature.
Like Ben, I am forced to do this kind of work in Illustrator at present, but I would much rather do it in Publisher, and it doesn't seem to be an unusual request to open a file that has embedded characters correctly, especially when I do have the fonts installed on my computer. 

Yes, it's a known major failing across the Affinity suite. Any PDF with embedded fonts cannot be relied upon to import correctly. This is true if you want to rasterize a PDF in Photo; or load into Designer for editing; or just position a PDF on a page in Publisher.

The only workaround is to Outline the fonts in the PDF using another program: don't use "Text as Curves" in the PDF Export options, use Outline fonts in Acrobat or Illustrator, or GhostScript.

I'm not asking to illegally extract fonts for my own use!  Currently, Affinity does not even display PDFs correctly when I DO have the fonts installed.
Yes, we need pass-through PDF for placing PDFs in Publisher: but we also need accurate Rasterisation to bitmap in Photo; and accurate vector editing in Designer (either with system fonts, replacements, or outlines). These things work perfectly in plenty of other apps, but not in Affinity.