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Text from Illustrator file being displayed incorrectly in Affinity Designer


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Hello,

I am trying to import a file which I originally made in Adobe Illustrator to Affinity Designer, however the text is extremely broken, almost as if Designer is somehow using a different text encoding method?

Does anyone know how to fix this? (Screenshot of file in Illustrator & in Designer attached)

Thank you!

ai.png

dn.png

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  • Staff

Hi @taeko,

Welcome to the Affinity Forums :)

Can you please confirm for me, do you have the font installed that is being used in this document?

Are you able to provide a copy of this .Ai file (even simply the text layers would be enough, with the other layers removed)?

If you require a private upload link for this file, please don't hesitate to ask.

Many thanks in advance!

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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  • 3 weeks later...

I just tried importing an Illustrator file, and found all the text is garbled. I have a variation of the original font used; I'm prompted to approve replacement of missing fonts when I open the AI file. It doesn't matter if I do so or not, the garbled text is the same. I'll provide the original file if I can remove proprietary info; I don't have AI anymore.

garbled.png

The left is imported from the AI file by Sketch (which does so un-editably). The right is Designer 1.10.1 under Mac OS.

After a lot of screwing around with numerous versions of the "Source Sans" font used here, it looks like the version of that font used to create the document is critical to reproducing the problem. "Source Sans Variable" most likely came with the Adobe suite, but Adobe also made it available as open source. But the open-source ones seem to have been revised and aren't recognized as the one in the AI file (I can only find a "Pro" version and "3VF" version). I've attached the one used in the AI file. I suggest creating an Illustrator document that uses it, and try importing it into Designer. Let me know if that doesn't repro it for you, and I'll try to get you a file.

Screen Shot 2021-09-01 at 4.44.08 PM.png

 

SourceSansVariable-Roman.otf

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  • Staff

Thanks for your report @Stokestack and I'm sorry to see you're having trouble!

I'm going to require a copy of this Ai file to further investigate this issue - can you please upload a copy below to the following link, then reply here to let me know once this has been completed?

https://www.dropbox.com/request/haN6PyU5S9DvlnW7LCVc

I can confirm this link is private, meaning only Affinity staff will be able to access this file, and it will be removed once we are finished with our testing. Hopefully this helps with your concerns over sharing the file.

Many thanks in advance :)

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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  • 1 year later...

I have the same issue, it happens with many ai files I tried to open with Affinity.

And this just happened again with Affinity Designer 2 as you can see on the attached image. Also the file was sent to me with the font it uses so I have the fonts installed.

I also attached the ai file so you can investigate it.

Thanks

Capture d’écran 2022-12-07 à 10.15.08.png

background_theatre_ipadmini.ai

Edited by jubarbie
Adding some more details about the fonts
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The clue is in the name of one of them Acumin variable concept.

The file opens fine in Adobe Illustrator, which supports variable fonts.
image.thumb.png.ae56b6be9d68099d49442045ae05cfed.png

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
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From Adobe Illustrator shows the Acumin Variable concept as a variable font.

2067006845_Screenshot2022-12-07at10_35_33.thumb.png.a2375cd1306f5daac9cd36a744ca7c7f.png

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
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As mentioned, the file has Acumin Variable Concept embedded. I am not sure if other than Adobe apps can handle properly embedded variable fonts (mapping them to installed fonts when opening a document). Adobe Fonts has this font also as static fonts but I am not sure if it is available as free font as static versions.

The .AI file has a PDF stream so just renaming the extension to .PDF and placing it in an Affinity app would allow rasterizing the file at high-res so that it could be used (but could not of course be edited).

I tried to open this in latest version of CorelDRAW [which supports both AI, to certain extent, and variable fonts] but it could not handle the encoding and open the text neither as text or as converted to curves, even if I have this font installed as variable version. CorelDRAW can handle variable fonts fine otherwise and shows the font in UI without problems. When CorelDRAW exports variable fonts into PDFs, it converts them to curves for better compatibility.

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Yep, I now tried it with Xara Designer Pro (19), and it opened it fine without even having the fonts installed. It is a great tool for these kinds of rescuing tasks, it could even export the file converting the embedded glyphs to curves when further exporting to PDF at least apparently without issues.

EDIT: After which it could be edited (in a way) also in Affinity apps:

image.png.ab785cee8aea736ebdbfe6d7dc555f15.png

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30 minutes ago, jubarbie said:

But I have the font installed and I'm able to use it in other Affinity documents and it looks fine

On macOS I have tested variable fonts with Affinity apps a few times and I think that they can render the glyphs fine but spacing is all wrong (they use the same spacing -- that of the Regular style -- for all sub styles). On Windows they can only render the regular instance of a variable font, and the font sub style list just shows "Regular" (repeatedly) as the style of all static instances.

So even if glyph rendering is ok, the Affinity apps cannot handle variable fonts correctly.

So it looks like this:

image.thumb.png.02e111b0e95e48b8409aebb254f5a461.png

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33 minutes ago, jubarbie said:

Hopefully Affinity apps will handle variable fonts soon because it seems like people working with Adobe use them a lot. Then I always have to ask my collegues to vertorize their document before sending them to me, but then I'm not able to edit the texts.

Yes, that's a rapidly increasing problem. For many fonts static versions are available (e.g. when purchasing fonts or downloading e.g. Google fonts), but delivering as one single font such superfamilies as Acumin is understandably a convenient way to make sure all available styles of a specific font are included (especially if packaging feature is not available).

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9 hours ago, jubarbie said:

But I have the font installed and I'm able to use it in other Affinity documents and it looks fine

I highly doubt that.
Please make a specimen page with various weights and widths.
There are 90 different pre-defined instances - pick 10 or more.
Then Export to PDF, attach the PDF here, and let's see what is actually in there.

3 hours ago, jubarbie said:

Hopefully Affinity apps will handle variable fonts soon because it seems like people working with Adobe use them a lot. Then I always have to ask my collegues to vertorize their document before sending them to me, but then I'm not able to edit the texts.

Just supporting variable fonts will not help here.

First: The PDF has embedded all styles as AcuminVariableConcept - no styles specified at all, and the family name does not even match what is in the font (which is AcuminConcept).
The way this is done does not follow Adobey's own recommendations.
Based on past experience this is probably to sabotage other applications.
The real font info is encrypted in the PDF, and/or in the AI file info.
The variable font does include the PostScript Name for all of the instances (which Adopey recommends/requires) so if pre-defined instances were used, that is how each style should have been embedded. If completely variable styles are used, Adopey has published their guide on how best to embed the fonts, and they did not follow their own guide.
And, the encoding for Unicode is complete garbage.
This has to be intentional as the PDFs from ID are usually correct.

Second: Acumin Variable Concept is an OpenType-PS variable font, not an OpenType-TT variable font (which 99% of current variable fonts are). Very few applications support this type of variable font because they require a new OpenType table (CFF2) which requires a lot of new programming to support. This is probably why there is garbage on the page in your first image.

Third: The PDF library also has to support this new CFF2 table, and variable fonts.
It has to know how to embed the characters/glyphs from that table.

Fourth: All the Adopey "Concept" fonts are limited sub-sets of the character sets in the static fonts. The variable font has 348 characters vs. the 626 characters in the static fonts. This can result in unexpected character substitutions. The two other fonts in your PDF are there for bullet characters (not sure why as the VF has a bullet character).

The "Concept" fonts are your basic "Nightmare."
They should only be used if a truly variable style is needed (not a pre-defined instance), and the PDF output is going to the printer.

If your colleagues are using pre-defined instances, they should just use the static fonts. And then Export that to PDF, and that PDF would hopefully have correctly embedded font names that would be easier for you to edit.
 

@lacerto
It is possible for the variable font named instances and the static font named styles to be interchangeable. The way Google Fonts configures their variable fonts - where both the variable font and the static fonts have the same family name - is done that way so if a web site serves a variable instance and it matches the static style installed on some user's computer, then font does not need to be downloaded (increased speed, lower bandwidth). But users had issues (browsers, etc.), so that local fallback is disabled for now in their recommended code (but web designers can still enable the local fallback themselves).
It works the same way with desktop fonts in Word for example. The M365 cloud fonts will supply static versions of the Bahnschrift variable font if the user does not have the variable, and the two are interchangeable. So the documents can then round-trip back and forth between those users.

The downside when the family name is the same is that for many applications (ie. Affinity) you cannot have both the statics and the variable installed or the names will conflict. Which is why most commercial font families name the variable font differently.

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@kenmcd, thanks for the information. This is all pretty confusing. I have very little experience of using variable fonts and cannot fully understand what's going on in this file. I later noticed (from screenshot by @firstdefence) that there is stuff that is off the PDF MediaBox in the attached .AI file, which cannot be read even by e.g. by CS6 version of AI. Xara, too, only opened the top part of the job. On the other hand, the PDF stream part can be placed for passthrough by apps like QXP 2018 not supporting variable fonts but so that embedded fonts are passed through, and by Affinity apps that will convert text to curves when further exporting to PDF.

So on the other hand, it seems that the fonts used by the design are embedded in a way that is compatible enough for passing through even by legacy apps (not supporting variable fonts), and on the other hand, that the AI part is exclusive also for legacy Adobe apps (which is to be expected). Basically extended compatibility was not the primary interest in delivery of this content, intended to be editable, so support for at least post CC2020 native proprietary format was assumed. 

Personally I think that advertizing AI compatibility in non-Adobe apps is a bit misleading as it seems it is mostly restricted to PDF streams when it is legal, and if there is licensed compatibility (as I assume there is in CorelDRAW), it is pretty limited. The rest (e.g. in Xara or VectorStyler) seems to be based on de-engineering and sometimes works, sometimes does not. 

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@kenmcd As I said on a later post, it doesn't look fine with the variable font, the letter spacing is odd, but the weight seems to be good, as you can see on this screenshot :

327960561_Capturedecran2022-12-08a09_36_56.png.95414aebfa537297a5aee1bf42780ba5.png

Thanks for all the explainations, I haven't understood everything though.

The thing is that I'm working with other people from other companies, it seems a bit complicated for me to tell them not to use specific kind of fonts because my software doesn't support them, they'll tell me to use Adobe as everyone else.

I've never met someone else using Affinity and I'm always the kind of guy saying that Adobe is bad and I'm using a way better software etc. But I feel a bit ashamed now having to tell them that my software isn't supporting such a basic thing as variable fonts. I'm not saying it is simple for the dev team to implement it but I'm saying that variable fonts are now everywhere and I have no authority to tell people not to use them.

I really don't wanna go back to Adobe... but I might since there is more and more documents I'm recieving that I cannot open. This really breaks the workflow are makes me loose time.

And I also would apreciate a lot if someone from the Serif team could say something about it. They stay pretty silent about it, I think we need an official answer. Are they planning on adding this feature ? Are they working on it ? Do they want to implement this ? I think users need to know.

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1 hour ago, jubarbie said:

The thing is that I'm working with other people from other companies, it seems a bit complicated for me to tell them not to use specific kind of fonts because my software doesn't support them, they'll tell me to use Adobe as everyone else.

I guess that it is the degree of co-operation and co-work that dictates which tools need to be used. If the idea is that your team can share common native file format for cross editing, and that file format for the rest of the team is AI (even if including PDF streams), or Illustrator EPS, or PDF that preserves Illustrator editing capabilities, you really need to have Illustrator as your tool, since AI and (Illustrator) EPS support of Affinity apps is very limited (as is support of these formats in other apps). [Even pure PDF support of Affinity apps is not complete, and even if it were, would not support many of the features that would be important for cross-editability, starting from layers.]

This is pretty much the same situation as if the rest of the team worked with Affinity apps using .afpub, .afdesign and .afphoto (which are one and the same format), but one of the team members needs to have files sent as PDFs. Exchange of information would be severely limited and much of the editability lost. It is unlikely that this will improve in the future because proprietary file formats guaranteeing full editability will stay that way.

Working with variable fonts however is not necessarily very common within Adobe app based team work, either, even if the most prominent Adobe apps support them well. Adobe Fonts, e.g., as far as I know, still only offers static fonts. As long as projects involve printing, use of variable fonts, IMO, is a bad idea. 

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On 12/8/2022 at 12:51 AM, jubarbie said:

But I feel a bit ashamed now having to tell them that my software isn't supporting such a basic thing as variable fonts.

The short version - the font info required is simply not there in the PDF, so supporting variable fonts is not going to help.

The font info required is in the AI file, which cannot be accessed, and/or it is encrypted in the PDF, which cannot be accessed.

So supporting variable fonts is not going to help (in this case).

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Adopey, that tickled me lol! 

@kenmcd interesting posts which are an education, so thanks for this, much appreciated.

iMac 27" 2019 Somona 14.3.1, iMac 27" Affinity Designer, Photo & Publisher V1 & V2, Adobe, Inkscape, Vectorstyler, Blender, C4D, Sketchup + more... XP-Pen Artist-22E, - iPad Pro 12.9  
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  • 2 weeks later...

@kenmcd I'm not sure to really understand. Does it mean that the person that created the Illustrator file should have done something when saving their document ? What can I say to my collegues for me to be able to open their files in the future ?

Also Serif says that Affinity supports AI file format for importation. So I guess it is not a full support and it should be mentioned in this page somewhere : https://affinity.help/designer/fr.lproj/index.html

And I'm also very surprised with the lack of communication from Serif regarding variable fonts... It's not mentionned anywhere on the documentation and they havent' been given any clear answer about it on twitter or on this forum.

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6 hours ago, jubarbie said:

What can I say to my collegues for me to be able to open their files in the future ?

Kenmcd can give details about situation with variable fonts, but I think that as far as co-operation goes, it is not realistic to expect to be able to exchange editable data between Adobe and Affinity apps. The reason for inadequate exchange of information between AI and Designer in this specific case was not so much because of Affinity apps do not support variable fonts, but more because there is inadequate information to exchange editable data, including variable fonts -- even if they were fully supported in Affinity apps.

Only parts that have been saved from within AI as PDF stream can be read in Affinity apps (or vice versa, saved in Affinity apps and opened in AI) and this excludes most of native features, and whatever can be read is editable only with restrictions. This applies also other apps, since AI file format is proprietary and not publicly documented. Some apps have slightly more extensive AI support, partly by mutual agreement of file format exchange (e.g. between Adobe and Corel), partly because efforts (more or less inadequate) to interpret (de-engineer) native AI file format (and also write it back, to some extent). But at least I do not know any non-Adobe app that can read and write AI file format, even close to feature level of current CC versions.

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5 hours ago, jubarbie said:

Also Serif says that Affinity supports AI file format for importation. So I guess it is not a full support and it should be mentioned in this page somewhere : https://affinity.help/designer/fr.lproj/index.html

 

From the English version after searching for the word "Illustrator".

32156721_ScreenShot2022-12-20at11_42_36AM.png.111501f5f436b5a157c6cdbfd04b35c6.png

" When importing Adobe Illustrator files, Affinity uses the embedded PDF in the file rather than the raw Illustrator data. "

So yes, it is a matter of your colleagues saving their Adobe Illustrator files with the PDF stream available.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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