AndreasFurster Posted November 4, 2020 Share Posted November 4, 2020 We open a lot of Illustrator files in Affinity Designer. Normally this works great. Now we have an Illustrator file where the text will not load into AD. There is not a single text block loaded in the document. Not even missing fonts. When we export to PDF from Illustrator and open the PDF in Edge or Adobe Reader the text is displayed perfectly. When importing that PDF into AD everything disappears again. When I use Ghostscript to convert the AI to PDF the PDF is also displayed ok in the browser or Adobe Reader. When opening in AD I get some missing fonts. When I replace them with another font the text loaded is gibberish. It seems like the wrong encoding or something. Also when copying the text from the pdf, the same thing occurs. issue.ai illustrator-exported.pdf ghostscript-converted.pdf Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Sean P Posted November 4, 2020 Staff Share Posted November 4, 2020 Hi AndreasFurster, The attached AI file is using a Variable font which is not currently supported in Affinity which I believe is why its failing to import/show up. I will get it passed over to development to see if it can be improved on import when using Variable Fonts. The Ghostscript converted PDF is also using a Variable Font, so is likely why that is not displaying correctly when switching fonts. I did switch the font to a non variable in AI and the file was then able to be imported ok! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AndreasFurster Posted November 4, 2020 Author Share Posted November 4, 2020 Hi Sean, Thanks for the fast response! That makes a lot of sense! I did not know about variable fonts. Seems like a cool feature (to implement). Maybe on the short term convert it to a normal (alternative) font or at least show an warning? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Sean P Posted November 4, 2020 Staff Share Posted November 4, 2020 4 minutes ago, AndreasFurster said: Hi Sean, Thanks for the fast response! That makes a lot of sense! I did not know about variable fonts. Seems like a cool feature (to implement). Maybe on the short term convert it to a normal (alternative) font or at least show an warning? Thats not a problem! Definitely I've passed your comments onto development as an improvement. In the meantime if it helps you can identify the font type used in Illustrator by the icon at the end. You'll see VAR (variable), SVG (SVG fonts), O (for OpenType) and TT (TrueType). Currently we don't support Variable and SVG. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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