PDF don't open as text-editable PDF anymore, only as image

[chris.da.rule]

hey guys

i just came across a brand new problem with affinity photo on my windows 10 laptop: when opening PDF, he opens as image, and not as text-editable PDF (artboard) anymore.

i worked with this function in plenty of my documents before, so i'm quite irritated by that. i already tried reboots, re installations, even converted the PDF around in different tools. nothing helped by now. at one point i thought it might be because he recognizes all fonts (no need to replace anything, maybe bug-like), or that it is a one-page document instead of multiple pages. but by now it showed to be no difference with the result.

can anybody relate to this issue, and/or help out? i'd appreciate a lot.

thanks, chris

[v_kyr]

Usually it should work with the default when opening PDFs. - You may check the contents of the PDF files with some other PDF capable tool too (a webbrowser, Acrobat Reader etc.).

Quote

 

To open Adobe PDF files:

1. From the File menu, click Open.
2. From the PDF Options dialog, you can choose:
   • A specific or all pages to import.
   • The document colour space that PDF contents will use. The Estimate option senses the PDF file's colour space and uses that.
   • Set the resolution for the PDF content.
   • If text is to remain more editable at the expense of accurate design reproduction.
   • If separate text lines can be treated as a single text frame to aid text flow.
   • To substitute a missing font with a similar replacement font.

For multi-page PDF files, each page is placed on its own layer. Switch on a hidden page's layer to view its content.

 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, chris.da.rule said:

when opening PDF, he opens as image, and not as text-editable PDF (artboard) anymore

Can you supply a PDF file for us to examine? Are you creating them in and different way, or getting them from some different source?

[chris.da.rule]

hey guys

thank you all for your comments so far. i would like to provide you with some more info:

the usual path for the PDF to be edited in affinity is: using my scanner (hp photosmart plus) to produce a PDF, opening that PDF in affinity, edit. BUT: i already found that the direct scan from my scanner leads to affinity prompting "the file type is not supported" (it definitely is a PDF...), so i added a step: loading the scanned PDF in pdf24 (that free PDF tool), saving as PDF again, and using this one to open in affinity (funnily enough, it works then). technically, it just changes the property "producer". by now, i already tried the PDF-output from pdf24, as well as affinity itself, but nothing worked out.

the PDF definitely contains text, BUT of course i cannot highlight any of it, since it is a scan. that's the actual reason why i want to use the affinity's OCR, to recognize it, and make it editable (like i already did with several documents in the past).

I attached two documents for you guys to examine. both of them won't lead to affinity making it text-editable.

• the first one opens, the PDF dialogue shows up, i press ok, and then he gives me (groups of) images again (instead of text recognition).
• the second one doesn't even open, affinity prompts "the file type is not supported".

thanks a lot in advance for any of your efforts. perhaps i'm lucky and somebody finds the key to this problem...

chris

Schufa-Auskunft.pdf 5193268_Erklärung Eigenständigkeit.pdf

[MEB]

Hi @chris.da.rule,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
Affinity doesn't perform any optical character recognition when loading PDF's. It's simply loads what's contained in the PDF (text if any and embedded fonts/font information plus images etc). The files you provided above are just scanned images - they do not contain any editable/selectable text. To make the text editable you must run the PDF through an OCR app first. Not sure yet why the second document is giving a parsing error.