mwdiers Posted July 6, 2020 Share Posted July 6, 2020 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 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mwdiers Posted July 6, 2020 Author Share Posted July 6, 2020 Here is the font itself. It is an open source font. Caeciliae.zip Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mwdiers Posted July 6, 2020 Author Share Posted July 6, 2020 And here is the publisher file from which the PDFs were exported. Pascha Nostrum - English.afpub Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mwdiers Posted July 6, 2020 Author Share Posted July 6, 2020 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). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Gabe Posted July 7, 2020 Staff Share Posted July 7, 2020 Hey @mwdiers, I don't know what PDF viewer you use, but I believe that's your issue. Adobe Acrobat shows no difference between your pdfs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
benwiggy Posted July 7, 2020 Share Posted July 7, 2020 Both PDFs display accurately for me in Preview. Interestingly: the "Embedded, but not subset" version imports accurately back into Publisher Beta, (for the fonts that I have installed); whereas the 'embedded but subset' version gives the usual terrible results. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
walt.farrell Posted July 7, 2020 Share Posted July 7, 2020 1 hour ago, benwiggy said: Interestingly: the "Embedded, but not subset" version imports accurately back into Publisher Beta, (for the fonts that I have installed); whereas the 'embedded but subset' version gives the usual terrible results. That has been reported before. If your file uses ligatures, and you want to export from Affinity as a PDF, and you want to bring the PDF back into Affinity, you cannot subset the embedded fonts. If you subset them, the ligatures won't work properly when you open the PDF in Affinity. A_B_C and Alfred 2 -- Walt Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases PC: Desktop: Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Laptop: Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU. iPad: iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard Mac: 2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mwdiers Posted July 7, 2020 Author Share Posted July 7, 2020 5 hours ago, Gabe said: Hey @mwdiers, I don't know what PDF viewer you use, but I believe that's your issue. Adobe Acrobat shows no difference between your pdfs. 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
benwiggy Posted July 7, 2020 Share Posted July 7, 2020 1 hour ago, walt.farrell said: That has been reported before. If you subset them, the ligatures won't work properly when you open the PDF in Affinity. It's long been said that Affinity can't handle embedded fonts: but I didn't realise that non-subsetting would improve matters. Sadly, not every app can provided PS/PDF in that spec. 1 minute ago, mwdiers said: As this is a known bug, I trust it will be addressed in due time. It's been due for some time! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
walt.farrell Posted July 7, 2020 Share Posted July 7, 2020 7 minutes ago, mwdiers said: As this is a known bug, I trust it will be addressed in due time. Note that I did not say it's a bug. It might be, of course, and Gabe can probably verify whether it's logged as a bug, or if it's just a behavior users need to accomodate. -- Walt Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases PC: Desktop: Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Laptop: Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU. iPad: iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard Mac: 2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mwdiers Posted July 7, 2020 Author Share Posted July 7, 2020 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
benwiggy Posted July 7, 2020 Share Posted July 7, 2020 No: the current implementation is beyond understanding: InDesign, Word, Pages, VivaDesigner, Scribus, Quark XPress can place a PDF with embedded fonts on a page, with 100% accuracy and 0 issues. Illustrator and any number of vector apps can open a PDF and edit the glyphs -- outlining only where necessary, but doing so accurately. Photoshop et al can raster a PDF containing subsetted fonts accurately. Affinity's behaviour is not something that users need to accommodate. I'm on a forum for music notation software with a whole bunch of people saying "let me know when Affinity can import a PDF properly." At the moment, I can't recommend it to them. This is something Affinity needs to accommodate for its users. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Gabe Posted July 8, 2020 Staff Share Posted July 8, 2020 17 hours ago, mwdiers said: So Publisher is technically the PDF viewer We don't do PDF pass through yet, so we "interpret" them when they are opened/placed. Anyways, the original issue has been logged A_B_C 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garrettm30 Posted July 8, 2020 Share Posted July 8, 2020 6 hours ago, Gabe said: We don't do PDF pass through yet I hope I may lean on that word "yet" to understand that Serif hopes to address this issue sometime in the future (however long that may be). A_B_C 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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