mwdiers

It is understandable that embedded fonts will always be a problem in a placed PDF, since the only practical option with a placed PDF is to render all fonts as curves. And that, of course, will thicken the font strokes, as hinting does not translate to beziers.

Interesting. That's actually a relief, as I have distributed a few of these supposedly bad files to people already. Those screenshots came from Publisher after placing both PDFs into a new Publisher document. So Publisher is technically the PDF viewer. So, as Walt pointed out, I guess the issue is with importing PDFs with subset fonts and ligatures, NOT with the creation of the PDFs in the first place. As this is a known bug, I trust it will be addressed in due time.

By the way, this file demonstrates that Publisher follows the OpenType specification really well. As well as InDesign. The Caeciliae font is generally not usable on most word processors because they don't follow the metrics accurately enough, or cannot handle multi-character glyphs. I used to create these chant pieces in InDesign, and had zero issues doing it in Publisher (other than the export issue, that is).

And here is the publisher file from which the PDFs were exported. Pascha Nostrum - English.afpub

Here is the font itself. It is an open source font. Caeciliae.zip

This is on: Affinity Publisher Beta 1.8.4.663 macOS 10.15.5 2019 16" Macbook Pro. See the two attachments. When exporting a PDF, fonts which use multi-character compositions are not properly subset. These are fonts which require two or more characters to be entered to type a single glyph. In the two attached PDFs, the font in question is Caeciliae, which is a Gregorian chant notation font. Most of the glyphs in this font require multi-character composition. Since I have the font installed on my system, the issue is not evident until I try to embed these PDFs into another Affinity document. See the screenshots which demonstrate the issue as I am seeing it. PN-English-No Subset Fonts.pdf PN-English-Subset fonts.pdf

This is a known issue and is fixed in the beta. The problem is specific to Mac Catalina. Exported PDFs have their fonts converted to outlines. Here is the current Publisher beta which fixes the problem:

IDML import has so far worked way better than I expected. I know it won't ever be perfect, but I'm sure it will continue to improve. To that end: tab stops are not translating correctly. Not exactly sure what is going on, but the resulting tab stops have no relation to the originals in InDesign, and have to be redone after import.

Now that 1.8 is out, the last piece in the puzzle keeping me away from Publisher has been removed. It now has IDML import that actually works (well, there are glitches, but it basically works). It will take me a long time to fully transition from Adobe, but I will do so. Footnotes, Endnotes, and a Cross-reference system is critical for me as well, and I will still have to use InDesign for book publishing for that reason. But I will use Publisher for everything else, if nothing more so that I can break it, file bug reports, and help to make it an even better product. As the CIO of a large printing company who pays out literally hundreds of thousands of $ to Adobe every year, I am dedicated to the overthrow of the Adobe Empire. Affinity is the only viable alternative to the unholy Adobe trinity.