Both Designer and Publisher change tabs or double spaces into weird chars - how to fix this?

[asdfasdf]

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!

[walt.farrell]

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.

[lacerto]

(...)

[asdfasdf]

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

[Old Bruce]

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.

[asdfasdf]

If I open the file in Acrobat Reader for example, or even the mac Preview app, those characters do not get changed at all.

[Old Bruce]

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.....

[asdfasdf]

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.

[DWright]

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