AD: Order of text boxes in exported PDF

[Matinski]

Hi everyone,

I have been using Affinity Designer for a couple of years now (mostly for scientific visualizations in journal papers), and I am pretty happy with it!

At the moment I am using AD to create a PDF document (a nicely looking CV), but I am having a problem with the exported PDF. When I copy the entire text in the PDF, and paste it to a simple notepad window, the text is out of order, i.e., not following the order within a layer or the order given by the placement in the document. It seems that the text box order depends on something else, but I have no clue what the order depends on and how I can change it. Does anyone have any advice?

Thanks a lot in advance!

Matinski

[v_kyr]

Hi,

hard to tell or reproduce without seeing any example or screenshots which one can follow here!

[Matinski]

Yes, sorry, should've given an example.
While creating an example, I actually noticed that an inverted order in "layers" creates a PDF with correctly ordering of text. For some reason, this didn't seem to work yesterday (or I was simply doing something wrong). There is probably a smarter way of doing this (such as using groups), but I also know that AD might not be the standard tool to do this...

Anyway, looks like the problem is resolved

Mathias

 

 

[v_kyr]

Well that's a matter of the exported format and how the apps which deal with that format do allow to select text via a clipboard based copy. - In your shown case, in Adobe's Acrobat Reader just the plain text portions are selected, meaning no indents (spaces, tabs) are selected or taken into account here. Thus only what is selected (the plain text without indents) is copied over into the Notepad text editor here in a plain text format.

It might be different with other tools like editors which then support the RTF format (like WordPad, MS Word, LibreOffice, ... etc.) when you copy/paste over via the system clipboard.

[Pšenda]

1 hour ago, Matinski said:

inverted order in "layers"

The layer order in the layer stack is always "from below".