Designer: Error exporting as pdf

[OliverGVA]

Hi

 

I am not able to export to pdf form Desgner anymore. I applied the Windows update today, but I don't know if it's related, since I havent used Designer for a few weeks.

 

 

I tried to save to differnt locations, avoiding spaces in the filename, accents, network drives, replicated directories etc.. Export to an image file is still working.

 

Anyone got a workaroud or correction for this?

 

Thanks for your help!

 

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

Does this happen with one specific Designer document, or with all documents?

When you say that you applied "the Windows update today" do you mean that you updated the Windows version of Designer, or that you updated Windows itself?

[OliverGVA]

Hi,

 

Thank you for your quick reply. I had troubles signing on again, thus my late response.

 

I updated Windows 10 that day. I don't know if it is realted, but as far as I remember, the last Designer update worked flawlessly (version 1.9.2.1035).

When I create a new document with some simple elements, it works fine. When I copy our logo to a new document, then I get the error. I attach the file to the message. Doing the same operation in Publisher does not export as well.

Thanks for your help!

 

--

Oliver

Failing Document.afdesign

[Joachim_L]

@OliverGVA This seems to be due to the complex gradient looking like a stylized S. How many stops did you add? I deleted a few, plus removing some extra layers (not necessary in my eyes).

Failing Document-less-complicated-gradient.afdesign

[OliverGVA]

Hi @Joachim_L , thanks for your reply and investigating the problem.

I have no idea how the logo is made - actually I am not a designer. I had this made for us and use it for years now.

Your version is exporting. The exported version has a little glitch on th right side of the circle. Changing the logo is not really an option for me, but as an intermediate solution I'll use a bitmap version so that I can get my files print ready.

The documents containing this logo exported very well for years now and the number of elements in the logo has never been a problem. I'll try installing Designer on another machine to see if the error reproduces.

Many thanks for your help.

 

--

Oliver

 

 

 

[Joachim_L]

16 minutes ago, OliverGVA said:

The exported version has a little glitch on th right side of the circle.

Oops, I did not check the export, sorry. Maybe the attached version works now.

repaired-logo.afdesign

[OliverGVA]

Thank you very much! This works perfectly! It's a work-around, but a great work-around!

[Patrick Connor]

@OliverGVA

Thanks for your post and Welcome, I have reported your problem to the developers. I think that Joachim_L is correct, in that the number of points in the gradient in the logo exceeds what the PDF export library can cope with for a vector fill, however the code should really fall back and export those complex fill elements as a bitmap/pixel layer instead rather than fail altogether. Do you have the source logo, was it an EPS or SVG file?

[Joachim_L]

1 minute ago, Patrick Connor said:

however the code should really fall back and export those complex fill elements as a bitmap/pixel layer instead rather than fail altogether

I would like to disagree. The user made everything vector based and so the user expects vectors in the output. If there is something pushing Affinity to its limits or exceeding its limits, then there should be an understandable warning, pointing to the problem. Instead of simply saying "file could not be exported". I am not a programmer, but somewhere an error was catched in order to issue the warning, so is it impossible to tell why the export failed? Would this message be too technical? What about an error number like 111 (too complex gradient), 192 (image with wrong ICC profile) and a list where users can look up the cause?

[Patrick Connor]

The program should never fail to export, and the dialog already tells you if any element "will be rasterized", but in the long term the right answer is to have a pre-flight type function that helps you avoid rasterization. It may well be possible to improve the export and keep it as vectors, but assuming that PDF gradient fill do have a maximum number of nodes in the specification (just guessing here) I would say that the file should still export (either as vector with fewer nodes, or as raster data for that element) not fail to export, no matter how good the error message. Perhaps a compromise would be to export, but then present a warning list, but that would take quite a lot of extra programming. 

[OliverGVA]

@Patrick Connor, thanks for reporting the problem to the developers.

It is difficult to trace back the origins of the logo. The original logo was an .ai file. At some time, I converted it to svg. I don't remember which version I imported with Designer. I think something has changed in the last few weeks. I installed the Designer update (inferring from the file dates) on April 5th. I found a document I exported as pdf successfully on the 15th containing the logo.

So I guess, something changed during the Windows update I got last week. I saw some other changes in system I never asked for, disturbing my workflows. So I am not surprised that Windows' updates stab the applications in the back. I was a software developer for 25 years...

The application failing more gracefully would be an improvement of course - I wouldn't be able to fix the file. though 🙂 Thanks to @Joachim_L once again for the correction.

Thanks to all for looking into my problem!

--

Oliver

 

[Patrick Connor]

@OliverGVA

 

In making my report I thought I would check all available versions and beta builds, and have some good news. If you would like to try the latest Windows Beta , available from here you should find that this problem has already been addressed, although the S element does have to be exported as a raster bitmap, as expected. You can use the beta version for this work or you can wait for it to be released in the future. 

[Patrick Connor]

actually on further investigation although your document exports, that is because of an improvement to exporting grouped cropped objects. The underlying problem of a gradient fill with more than 256 points will still fail to export unless something else causes it to rasterize, so improved but not fixed.

[OliverGVA]

Thank you, I'll check the beta later.

I start understanding the problems with the number of points and I am sure that 256 is already ridiculus number. I'll fix my source files first

 

[lacerto]

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