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PDF Import font issues remain


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Imported PDFs of music notation glyphs from Dorico seem to be much improved.  But some PDF import issues remain in this build:

Common ligatures, like fi, ffi, are not always displayed correctly. See my PDF "Affinity FI.pdf", exported from InDesign as PDF/X-3. Only Garamond Premier retains the ligature glyph: Minion Pro and Kepler Std do not.

The beta does not recognise Small Caps, in a PDF created in Affinity Publisher. See "Small Caps.pdf". 

However, it may be interesting to note that rinsing the PDF through MacOS's PDFKit has a very destructive effect when placing in Affinity. See "Good PDF.pdf", which is Dorico's own export using the Qt framework, and "Bad PDF.pdf", which is the same file, saved again in Preview.

Screenshot.png

Good PDF.pdf

Affinity FI.pdf

Small Caps.pdf

Music FI.pdf

Bad PDF.pdf

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I'm not sure that I can provide you with Adobe/Monotype commercial fonts. I'll ask the music font's creator, though. You should be able to test the ligature and Small Caps behaviour in any OpenType font. 

The music glyphs are all in the PUA Unicode range, which may be of relevance.

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1 hour ago, benwiggy said:

You should be able to test the ligature and Small Caps behaviour in any OpenType font. 

I'm afraid I can't replicate this. It's all fine on my end. 

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14 minutes ago, benwiggy said:

The ligatures are not used

I think you cannot expect ligatures, when the character spacing / tracking for nearly every single character has a different value. The f of filled has -25% and the i of filled has -14%. Change them to e.g. -25% for all characters and you get your ligatures back. If I open your document there is no small caps formatting applied?!?

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Windows 10 | i5-8500 CPU | Intel UHD 630 Graphics | 32 GB RAM | Latest Retail and Beta versions of complete Affinity range installed

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9 minutes ago, Joachim_L said:

I think you cannot expect ligatures, when the character spacing / tracking for nearly every single character has a different value. The f of filled has -25% and the i of filled has -14%. Change them to e.g. -25% for all characters and you get your ligatures back. If I open your document there is no small caps formatting applied?!?

Can you export a PDF and re-import it, looking the same?

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Funny. Exporting as X-3 and opening again keeps the ligatures, but drops the small caps. But I have to confess here, that I am on Windows. In the end Affinity should read their "own" PDF properly.

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Windows 10 | i5-8500 CPU | Intel UHD 630 Graphics | 32 GB RAM | Latest Retail and Beta versions of complete Affinity range installed

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3 minutes ago, Gabe said:

 Ligatures are imported correctly when Favour Editable text over fidelity is ticked. Issue logged.

Presumably the issue is that unticking this box should give better results. Is that correct?
Music FI.pdf
I'm still seeing missing ligatures in this PDF with the box ticked. (The ? is a missing fi.)

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22 hours ago, benwiggy said:

Presumably the issue is that unticking this box should give better results. Is that correct?

I ended up logging both issues as that tick box seems to work the other way around for ligatures. 

22 hours ago, benwiggy said:

Music FI.pdf
I'm still seeing missing ligatures in this PDF with the box ticked. (The ? is a missing fi.)

We've not got the fonts form you yet, so can't really check this issue. :(

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31 minutes ago, Gabe said:

We've not got the fonts form you yet, so can't really check this issue. :(

Will do so on the assumption that you have licences for Adobe fonts. 

Any thoughts about why PDFKit is mangling the results?

I have to say, you're still trying to interpret the individual contents of the PDF as page-object data for Publisher, rather than offering a placed "pass-through" PDF-as-image functionality, which users are crying out for. At the very least, please offer a checkbox to outline glyphs that you can't work out.

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Here's an interesting fact: if I take PDFs that Affinity doesn't import properly and convert them to EPS -- then Affinity imports them perfectly! Even though they contain the same subsetted embedded fonts! 

Distilling the EPS file back to PDF: hey presto, I get the same errors again.

I hope this is useful in fixing the problem.

Bad PDF.eps Music FI.eps

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We don't read Embedded fonts in EPS, but convert everything to curves at import. 

The only "FI" in your Music FI.pdf is in Wigfield at the bottom of the document, and that imports correctly as far as I can tell.

  • With "Favour Editable text over fidelity" Off, it imports as a ligature and you can't edit to separate it (expected)
  • With "Favour Editable text over fidelity" On, it imports as a ligature, and you can separate it if you want in the Character > Typography (expected)
On 7/6/2020 at 1:19 PM, benwiggy said:

I'm still seeing missing ligatures in this PDF with the box ticked. (The ? is a missing fi.)

Where is this "?"  I can't find it. 

 

 

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The question mark that replaces the ligature can be seen here:

1715909888_Screenshot17.png.51f6329cd6f9f7a2be515795ff5e16d1.png

 

31 minutes ago, Gabe said:

EPS don't use fonts, but convert everything to curves. 

The EPS files I attached both have fonts embedded, but you are right that Publisher does outline everything in the EPS file when it imports it. 

If we could have an "outline everything" checkbox when importing PDFs, that would solve most of the problems.

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27 minutes ago, benwiggy said:

The question mark that replaces the ligature can be seen here:

1715909888_Screenshot17.png.51f6329cd6f9f7a2be515795ff5e16d1.png

Very interesting. I saw I've got a Missing font notification, but Find and Replace could not find any occurrences of it in the file, so just assumed it's not been used. I'm still missing image.png now. 

That EPS file has got an embedded PDF inside it. Our apps don't read embedded fonts, so we convert everything to curves. Adobe Illustrator does the same thing with that file, and converts all text to paths during the import. I've edited my original reply about eps. Should have been more clear :)Screenshot 2020-07-08 at 11.38.52.png

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All the lyrics in the music are set in Kepler SemiCondensed Caption.

As said, If you could add a checkbox in the PDF import dialog to outline everything, as you do for EPS , that would fix many of the problems.

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It would be nice, if AP dont touch the content of a PDF/EPS. Just import as it is.

Im wondering why this isnt possible.

I would like to work with AP instead of A InD, but this PDF-"Feature" is deadly for our company.
We have to use PDFs from our customers in 80% of our work. With every occurrence of an PDF we must fear for the result.

Please add a "leave untouched"-function, as requested a year ago.

Hopefully ... Martin

Regards, Martin

iMac 27", 2017/Big Sur 11.2.2
MacMini M1/BigSur 11.2.2

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You don't get a PDF on a page by 'not doing anything to it': the data has to be read and rendered for display, and then stored within the .afpub data format somehow. 

Serif have previously said that "Pass-through" PDF is unlikely to appear before version 2, and that there is some difficulty for them in implementing.  Obviously, parsing PDF data and displaying it on screen is not a novel, unique or unsolved problem. So the difficulty must lie elsewhere, and we can only speculate on why and what that is.

However, that's only one use case for PDFs: opening to edit the shapes, as in Illustrator, or opening a rastered bitmap version, as in Photoshop, are also daily tasks. 

I'm hoping that Serif can achieve these last two more easily by outlining the fonts on import, which they already do for EPS files. 

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