asdfasdf Posted April 28, 2021 Share Posted April 28, 2021 I'm new to using Affinity Designer and Publisher, and I need to do some basic changes in some pdf files. But when I open those, I see some weird transformations done by Designer (Publisher does the same thing). For example I have this text in the original pdf: " Think about your own life." So the text has a space at the beginning. This shows up in Designer as: "&Think about your own life." Same happens if there is a tab at the beginning. And if I export the file to PDF after I do the changes I want (which are only about setting some printer specific stuff related to font colours), that & at the beginning is in the exported file. Any idea how can I disable that weird & at the beginning? Thank you for your help! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
walt.farrell Posted April 28, 2021 Share Posted April 28, 2021 Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums. That is weird. Please provide a sample .afdesign or .afpub document that demonstrates it. Also: what OS do you use? And did you type that text, or did you import it from someplace else (and if so, from where, and how)? Edit: Read too quickly, and missed that PDF is the source. Sorry. @Lagarto's idea sounds good. Quote -- 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...
lacerto Posted April 29, 2021 Share Posted April 29, 2021 (...) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
asdfasdf Posted April 29, 2021 Author Share Posted April 29, 2021 Thank you for the suggestions, we do use an external library to generate those PDF files but I cannot say if its internals use LaTeX or not. I've attached the afpub where you can see the weirdness. The original text is this: -- starts here one two three —four five six seven eight nine eleven twelve -- ends here What happens in Affinity is two things: 1. that longer line right before "four" is translated into a strikethrough in Affinity 2. the tabs before "seven" and "eleven" are translated into & Any ideas? Thank you! zz.afpub Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Bruce Posted April 29, 2021 Share Posted April 29, 2021 18 minutes ago, bw-sergiu said: 1. that longer line right before "four" is translated into a strikethrough in Affinity That dash is a dash but it has a massively large negative kerning value applied. 19 minutes ago, bw-sergiu said: 2. the tabs before "seven" and "eleven" are translated into & Just guessing: For some reason the Glyph code is used instead of the Unicode when I select it and use Toggle Unicode. I suspect the original font in the original document was using Glyph codes and that was in that originally used font as a tab character. Quote Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 Affinity Designer 2.4.1 | Affinity Photo 2.4.1 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.1 | Beta versions as they appear. I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
asdfasdf Posted April 29, 2021 Author Share Posted April 29, 2021 If I open the file in Acrobat Reader for example, or even the mac Preview app, those characters do not get changed at all. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Bruce Posted April 29, 2021 Share Posted April 29, 2021 23 hours ago, bw-sergiu said: I'm new to using Affinity Designer and Publisher, and I need to do some basic changes in some pdf files. This is the source of the problem, the importing/Copy and Paste of PDF files causes myriad problems. Quite often the application which generated the PDF has created weird bogus control characters which make sense only in the Creating Application but they don't print out in the PDF but they are present. These are carried over into Publisher or Pages or Word or Quark ... and we see this weirdness. I noticed that the text is on individual lines could you try opening the PDF and use Group line of text..... Quote Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 Affinity Designer 2.4.1 | Affinity Photo 2.4.1 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.1 | Beta versions as they appear. I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
asdfasdf Posted April 29, 2021 Author Share Posted April 29, 2021 Thank you for the suggestion, though this does not fix the issue. As a context, these are PDFs we generate in an app of ours and we use a React library to generate the PDF. We have set the text font to using a Sans Serif font, and now the spaces show up like spaces when importing in Affinity, and also that longer dash shows up correctly now. Thank you guys for the suggestions, and after reading and re-reading them I got the idea to change the font. Thanks again, I'm glad I did not have to switch to Acrobat Reader (or any other Adobe app) for the transformations we have to do inside the file. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff DWright Posted May 5, 2021 Staff Share Posted May 5, 2021 Hi @asdfasdf, Is it possible for you to attach the original source PDF so I can check which engine was used to create it as it may be HTML encoded Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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