PDF rendering issues....very frustrating

[imercreative]

Hi Affinity Team

Have finally jumped in the deep end and am having loads of fun "learning while creating" in Affinity Designer. An amazing bit of software which I'm already enjoying far more than Illustrator!

I just wrapped up creating some simple illustrations for my kids school, but have run into a serious PDF rendering issue of my files.
Each PDF saved, displays strange blocks across my illustrations or has sections where content is missing. This is very troubling, as I have no way of being able to export a vector version of my work. My only temporary solution is saving the images as high-res PNG files, which thankfully do render correctly.

I have included a side-by-side comparison of a PDF and PNG export of one of the illustrations, so you can see what is frustrating me. The PDF illustration was saved as PDF (digital - high quality)
Is there a simple fix for this problem? Have currently tried all the different PDF saving/exporting options, with the same results. 

I am running version 1.8.3.641 of Designer on my PC.

Hope you can help!

[imercreative]

So nobody else has had issues with exporting PDFs out of Designer and their generated files opening up corrupted, as per my example?
For me it really puts a massive question mark on the value/usefulness of the software, if I am using a Vector-based program, but am not able to generate a functioning, cross-platform vector file at the end of the design process. 

[Joachim_L]

Welcome to the forums imercreative. Maybe you should post the .afdesign file here for bug hunting?

[imercreative]

Hi Joachim_L 
If that helps with hopefully coming up with a solution, I'm more than happy to. 

WE CARE.afdesign

Edited May 8, 2020 by imercreative

[Joachim_L]

This is more a raster file than a vector file. Most of the elements have an effect applied. And somehow AD fails on rasterising properly all the effects together. You can export as wanted if you select Rasterise all under the More button in the Export dialogue, but then there is no more vector element. Or perhaps it helps, when you rasterise the failing parts before export and leave the working parts untouched?

Sorry for not being more helpful here, but this seems to be a case for the developers.

 

[imercreative]

15 minutes ago, Joachim_L said:

This is more a raster file than a vector file. Most of the elements have an effect applied.

 

Thanks for having a look Joachim_L. The whole image is created in the Designer Persona, so I was assuming it treats every element as a vector element.
This is such a frustrating bug.

[walt.farrell]

50 minutes ago, imercreative said:

The whole image is created in the Designer Persona, so I was assuming it treats every element as a vector element.
This is such a frustrating bug.

I think you'll find that PDF does not support vector versions of some of the effects you're using. So it's not a bug, just a limitation of the output format. As Joachim has said, try selecting Rasterize All in your PDF Export options (click the More button) and see if that gets you what you need.

[Joachim_L]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

So it's not a bug, just a limitation of the output format.

Failures in rasterisation - as we see it - is a bug.

[walt.farrell]

30 minutes ago, Joachim_L said:

Failures in rasterisation - as we see it - is a bug.

It depends. What rasterization option was chosen?

• If imercreative chose not to rasterize anything, then it's their problem, not a bug. (Or, if PDF does support that effect in a vector form, but Affinity does not yet support it, that's a missing feature in Affinity.)
• If they chose to rasterize everything, and something was not rasterized properly, that would be a bug.

[Joachim_L]

Standard export tells that there are areas that will be rasterised. So the auto-detection of rasterisation fails partially. So this is a bug. 

[imercreative]

23 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

I think you'll find that PDF does not support vector versions of some of the effects you're using. So it's not a bug, just a limitation of the output format. As Joachim has said, try selecting Rasterize All in your PDF Export options (click the More button) and see if that gets you what you need.

Hi walt.farrell 😉
Thanks for your tip, but if I choose to rasterise all in the PDF options.......I may as well be using a different format to save the document - such as PNG.
My whole intention of using PDF, is to preserve what I created as a vector illustration.

It's a shame that with the effects I have used within the program......which were predominantly just "gaussian blur" on some of my fill in shapes to blend the different colour tones - this feature seems to be the likely cause of the error when viewing the exported PDF.

I may need to dive into the limitations and the "do's and don'ts" of Affinity Designer to be able to preserve an illustration as "purely a vector file" when trying to generate a PDF.
Saving the file as an EPS also causes the same errors.

 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, imercreative said:

I may need to dive into the limitations and the "do's and don'ts" of Affinity Designer to be able to preserve an illustration as "purely a vector file" when trying to generate a PDF.
Saving the file as an EPS also causes the same errors.

You'll need to check both the limitations of Designer and the limitations of PDF, I think.