Bullets disappear when export to PDF in Publisher 1.9.2.1035

[CatLady]

I have made a text style that creates a Wingdings check box at the start of "Bulleted list". I add a tab after the bullet (too lazy to make it add its own tab in the stylesheet). It's fine until I export to PDF. The bullet boxes disappear. Is there a work-around?

Membership-2up-Form.pdf Membership-2up-Form.afpub

[PaulEC]

It looks OK to me, have you tried using a different PDF viewer?

[Pšenda]

I also have no problem.

[CatLady]

Thank you all!

The PDF viewer that doesn't show the boxes is Affinity Publisher itself. But thanks for the suggestion to try a different PDF viewer. It looks OK in Firefox! Why can't Publisher show me what's there??

I cold-rebooted and restarted Publisher. Still doesn't show the bullet boxes in a PDF created by Publisher from Publisher's own .afpub document. So it looks like other people will be able to see the doc correctly, but I can't, in the program that created it.

I will try reinstalling Publisher.

[R C-R]

FWIW, I exported your afpub file to PDF & then opened that in APub on my Mac. Unlike your pdf, the APub Font Manager for my export for Wingdings said "Unsupported characters used" & displays the 'missing character' rectangle where the Wingdings checkbox should be. (For your pdf export, Font Manager just says "OK" but the checkboxes are not displayed.)

Curiously, my Mac's QuickView feature shows the checkboxes, both for your APub file & for all the pdf versions, & Preview app shows them for all the pdf exports.

This feels like some kind of bug in APUb's PDF import handling of the Wingdings font, possibly only on Macs....

[Pšenda]

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

possibly only on Macs....

Same as Windows.

 

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

This feels like some kind of bug in APUb's PDF import handling of the Wingdings font

I tried other type Wingdings checkbox, and this work fine.

 

Edit: So it was probably a checkbox of another font. Any character from Wingdings really doesn't work.

Edited May 16, 2021 by Pšenda

[CatLady]

Thank you all!

The PDF viewer that doesn't show the boxes is Affinity Publisher itself. But thanks for the suggestion to try a different PDF viewer. It looks OK in Firefox! Why can't Publisher show me what's there??

I cold-rebooted and restarted Publisher. Still doesn't show the bullet boxes in a PDF created by Publisher from Publisher's own .afpub document.

 

[CatLady]

RC-R: Thanks, but I'm on Windows 10, current version, being auto-updated. So it's not just a problem on MACs. In my computer, it's not showing the bullets in the very program that MADE the PDF, from the .afpub doc itself.

If I open the .pdf and look at the non-bulleted items, the text styles have been not copied into this document. If I import them and reapply the style, the bullets show up. Then, since it's now back in .afpub format, I re-export it to .pdf, and the .pdf has no bullets. There seems to be no way I can get the bullets to show up in the program that created the .pdf, BUT some other programs DO show them.

I tell ya, I'm thinking of springing for something that doesn't have as many problems, although I hate to not support Serif.

[Joachim_L]

5 hours ago, CatLady said:

There seems to be no way I can get the bullets to show up in the program that created the .pdf

When you export the PDF do not use Subset Fonts, you'll find this setting under the More button in the export dialogue. Doing so and opening the file again shows the bullets properly.

Membership-2up-Form-nosubset.pdf

[lacerto]

(...)

[kenmcd]

On 5/16/2021 at 1:10 AM, CatLady said:

I have made a text style that creates a Wingdings check box at the start of "Bulleted list".

Wingdings is a symbol font, not a Unicode font, so round-trips through a PDF are going to be a problem.

In Unicode that symbol would be code point 2751, Lower right shadowed white square.
That symbol (Unicode code point) is present in a number of the Windows fonts, and quite a few free open source fonts.
Windows fonts include: Segoe UI Symbol, Meiryo, Meiryo UI (in JP supl. fonts), MS Gothic, and a few more.
Free open source fonts include: DejaVu Sans, Free Serif, Noto Sans Symbols2, etc.

The Unicode Code Block is Dingbats if you want to look in some of your other fonts.

I think your best bet is to use Segoe UI Symbol as that is going to be on all Windows systems.
Please give that a try and let us know how it goes.

 

[CatLady]

Thanks, Guys! You have been very informative.

On not using the "subset fonts" option in the export to PDF -- wow. The half-sheet version goes from 70kb to 1,246 kb! That's 17.8 times as large! Ouch!

Maybe I can use a PNG picture of a checkbox, and manually place it.

But Affinity really does need to fix this!

[CatLady]

To LibreTraining: THANK YOU! I couldn't understand why Windgings was not transferring when other fonts came out OK. I will try your suggestion on Segoe UI.

[kenmcd]

3 hours ago, CatLady said:

I will try your suggestion on Segoe UI.

OK. Great. Please let us know how it goes to confirm this works.

And make sure you use Segoe UI Symbol.