Type exporting to PDF wrong

[CameronS]

Hoping someone can help.. Our macs work fine.  But on windows if we export a file... or even create a new file and type "ff" with arial (arial only, not arial bold or any other), when we export pdf it changes to a box.  Reinstalled arial, rebuilt font cache in windows, still no change.  Adobe programs it works fine, but in any affinity program we get the same box character, and also if there is more text in the text box it will effect spacing and the look of it.  Have no idea how to fix.

[CameronS]

Just as a follow up, theres something really wrong here...

If I export a simple text box from indesign with arial to a pdf the properties of the pdf embed the font ArialMT

If I export the exact same thing from affinity, the pdf tries to embed the font ArialMT-Light

Wrong font, and garbled output.  Anyone?  Affinity team?  

I gather its a windows/font thing, but ive tried reinstalling fonts and clearing caches, but nothing is changing the output, and indesign is handling the fonts just fine on the same machine.

[Greyfox]

7 hours ago, CameronS said:

.. But on windows if we export a file... or even create a new file and type "ff" with arial (arial only, not arial bold or any other), when we export pdf it changes to a box.

For what it is worth, that's not happening here. PDF exports of "ff" from Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher are all correctly showing "ff" and all showing ArialMT as the font in use.

Not sure which application you are using, but could you perhaps post an .afphoto or afdesign or .afpub file with the "ff" in it.

[CameronS]

Thanks Greyfox, I really appreciate that. (Tried all affinity programs, same result) That helped narrow it down a bit... something really weird with our arial maybe.. I did some more investigating and it looks like adobe runs its fonts from the cloud which leads me to believe we have something wrong with our arial.. Can you share yours?  not sure if thats a no no to ask for... 

There is another font issue on investigation too.. We have a publication that was created in indesign, saved to an idml. It opens fine, gives no font issue.. but without any font warnings or issues, it is replacing Myriad Pro - Regular, with Myriad Pro - Semi Extended.  If we install Myriad Pro - Regular, all is good.. but without it installed it is just switchign the font to a different one in the family without any warning and the whole document reflows.  

[kenmcd]

19 hours ago, CameronS said:

If I export the exact same thing from affinity, the pdf tries to embed the font ArialMT-Light

Check the text in the document to confirm the Font Style selected is correct. Highlight some of the text which is exporting wrong and then look at the Font Style in the toolbar. Is it correct or is it blank?

A couple other users have had issues with PDF export where the Font Style has been lost when moving between versions or OS.

 

[CameronS]

Hey LibreTraining, absolutely the fonts are set. 

[kenmcd]

5 hours ago, CameronS said:

Hey LibreTraining, absolutely the fonts are set. 

Can you please attach the doc for testing?

And just to confirm, this is when exporting to PDF from Windows.

[CameronS]

4 minutes ago, LibreTraining said:

Can you please attach the doc for testing?

And just to confirm, this is when exporting to PDF from Windows.

I will try and send one over tomorrow.  Yes when exporting pdf with any settings in windows.. the only setting that resolves it is to tell the fonts to convert to outlines when exporting.

[kenmcd]

I just remembered, ArialMT is a macOS version of Arial. Correct?

Are the fonts available on the Windows system?

Seems like I also remember an issue with those fonts, at least in some older versions. IIRC the Regular font did not actually have "Regular" in the either the typographic sub-family or in the style group sub-family... and this created some issues when going cross-platform. I would really like to see the actual fonts if you could PM a link to me for the files. 

Hmmmm ... just looked at Arial MT Pro, and Arial Nova and they do not have that issue.

Like to see those macOS fonts.

[CameronS]

Here is our example.. the publisher file is just the text 'ff' in arial regular.

You should be able to see in the pdf properties that it is embedding it as arialmt-light, and its corrupt somehow.

Arial_ff.pdf Arial_ff.afpub

[CameronS]

Also, here is our arial font.arial.zip

[kenmcd]

OK. Thanks for the files.

I mis-remembered ... (hey, I'm old, it happens).

The issue is the PostScript Name is missing the style.
It does not follow the recommended naming convention (in the Adobe PDF specs).
It just says
ArialMT
when it should say
ArialMT-Regular
The PDF library has an issue with this and gets confused.

I had no issues exporting the file with no changes.
But on Windows I only have a four font style group; you have a whole extended font family installed on Macs.
The name on the font it did attempt embed was also a bit odd, so it did not work either.

Made you two fonts to test.
1. fixed PostScript Name (arial.ttf)
2. fixed PS Name and renamed (ArialAF-Regular.ttf)

arial.fixes.7z

The first one should work, but replacing a system font can be a bit tricky on both macOS and Windows.
In the second one I changed the name so it can be installed at the same time (and not affect anything else).
Install, apply to the text, export, done.

Also you may want to consider versions without this issue.
Arial Nova is available free with Windows 10. But it does not have all the same styles. It worked fine on your doc.
Arial MT Pro has all the styles you have, and it also worked fine.

Please let me know if either font works to fix your issue.
Or if it is back to the drawing board ...

 

p.s. this one of those situations where it would be really nice if Affinity implemented the font folders! Guys, hello .... 🙂

 

 

[CameronS]

Thanks!  Ill give those a try.  For the record its not necessarily 'arialMT' that is the issue.  We have 'Arial-Regular' which is different than 'ArialMT'. Which is why its weird that the font in the file is Arial-Regular, and the exported PDF is trying to embed a different font (ArialMT). 

Which then leads to the other idml file we are opening that is using Myriad - Regular and opening it with a different Myriad family font without saying anything and just reflowing the text all wrong.

Will give those fonts you sent over a try and get back to you.

 

[CameronS]

Ok.. so the first font did not work.. it did the exact same thing.. it seems to keep trying to override the font because its the same name?

The second (renamed) font worked perfectly.. it holds the font we selected and exports properly.

Im not really sure how to solve this though (definitely a step in the right direction) but affinity should not be subbing fonts on its own... 

[kenmcd]

1 hour ago, CameronS said:

For the record its not necessarily 'arialMT' that is the issue.  We have 'Arial-Regular' which is different than 'ArialMT'. Which is why its weird that the font in the file is Arial-Regular, and the exported PDF is trying to embed a different font (ArialMT). 

Yeah, that is part of the weirdness of these fonts, the PostScript Name is different from the font family name.
This is odd and normally would not happen when configuring the names in any advanced font editor.
I had to change it manually because the font editor(s) wanted to "fix" it.

 

48 minutes ago, CameronS said:

Ok.. so the first font did not work.. it did the exact same thing.. it seems to keep trying to override the font because its the same name?

The OSs will not let you simply un-install a protected system font. It is a bit of a process to replace system fonts.
So if you did not go through that process you probably still have the original font installed.
If you did get it replaced, you would still need to clear your font cache.
Which is why I made you the fixed-&-renamed version.

 

48 minutes ago, CameronS said:

Im not really sure how to solve this though (definitely a step in the right direction) but affinity should not be subbing fonts on its own... 

The problem is in the fonts because they do not follow the proper naming "rules" for the PostScript Name (which is used on export to PDF).
Then PDFLib used in Affinity apps expects the font to be properly configured to the PDF specs, and it gets confused when they do not.
So technically it is not their fault ... BUT, not handling these font errors is obviously a problem for users.
It appears that Adopey apps have some "fonts-AI" which knows about issues like this and works around them.
Affinity has been slowly adding their own fonts-AI work-arounds.
For example like dealing with the non-breaking space being wider than the space in the old BT fonts which everybody has.
The Affinity fonts-AI now fixes this transparently and on the fly. The fonts are still "broken" but users never know, nor do they need to.
But as you can see there is more to be done.
This issue with Arial has been around a long time, and will continue to be a problem for users until a special work-around is implemented.
One of the other MS font families has this same issue; do not remember which at the moment.

In the meantime, we got you a solution which does get you going again. Get back to work. 😁

 

[CameronS]

Yes we do have a work around and I appreciate that.  I did replace the system font and rebuild the system font cache.. didnt seem to work but I wouldnt say I am super confident in the process.

There is still a serious issue in affinity that I noticed while testing this.  The other file that was supplied to us in an idml format... uses MyriadPro-Regular.  On one machine that does not have MyriadPro at all, affinity shows a missing font issue.  On another machine, that has MyriadPro, but not "Regular", it subbed out the font for a different format of MyriadPro, "ExtendedLight" or something like that.  It gives no warning or error, it just subs the font with something else in the same family.  Being a print company, this is super dangerous.  In this case we could easily tell the text was not flowing properly, but if its something you dont notice thats a big issue.

I am not sure of the behind the scenes workings, but seems like its sort of the same issue with replacing fonts.

[kenmcd]

2 hours ago, CameronS said:

There is still a serious issue in affinity that I noticed while testing this.  The other file that was supplied to us in an idml format... uses MyriadPro-Regular.  On one machine that does not have MyriadPro at all, affinity shows a missing font issue.  On another machine, that has MyriadPro, but not "Regular", it subbed out the font for a different format of MyriadPro, "ExtendedLight" or something like that.  It gives no warning or error, it just subs the font with something else in the same family.  Being a print company, this is super dangerous.  In this case we could easily tell the text was not flowing properly, but if its something you dont notice thats a big issue.

This is an issue with importing an IDML file, identifying the fonts applied, and doing any needed font replacements, and does sound serious.
But it is really a different issue.
I suggest you document this import issue in more detail and post it in the Publisher Bugs forum to get the proper attention.

 

2 hours ago, CameronS said:

I am not sure of the behind the scenes workings, but seems like its sort of the same issue with replacing fonts.

Your original issue here is the proper font being embedded in the PDF.
In testing 100+ font families in LibreOffice I determined the #1 reason the wrong font ended-up in the PDF was the PostScript Name was wrong in some or all of the fonts in a font family.
Fix the PostScript Names inside the fonts and it all worked properly.

APub does already have the correct font applied in the document (I assume), but that is not making it into the Export to PDF.
That is where the PostScript Name comes into play.
If that is messed-up usually what happens is the wrong font is embedded.
Your issue seems to be more unusual in that no font gets embedded because even the wrong font name appears to be bogus.
The font name that was embedded was ArialMTLight - which also looks wrong (and probably not what is in that font).
It should be ArialMT-Light (which is what is probably what actually is in the font).
I do not have that font, but in the pro version it is ArialMTPro-Light.
That is the proper postscript name format with the dash.

Hmmmm .... are all these documents imported IDML?
I am wondering if it is messed-up on the import.

Someone is probably going to need to see the actual documents to see what is going on.
The Affinity folks will provide a private upload box for you if needed.

I, or anyone, cannot test it without all the actual fonts you have installed (just for that font family).
They already have them all because they have Macs.