PDF Mask Layer Issue with Mac Preview

[OBrienDesignStudio]

Having an issue with mask layers when exporting to PDF from Affinity Publisher. 

When viewing the PDF in Mac's Preview, you see a layer that lightens the background in an area for a Distress Effect that's supposed to be masked to the shape of the Blue Object in the picture below.

I have the Blue Object grouped with a Distress Effect which is set to Erase. If I rasterize the layer I don't have this issue but sometimes I don't have the option to rasterize it depending on where I use the assets.

Is this an Affinity Issue or and Export Issue? Or maybe just an incompatibility issue with Preview. I can't replicate it in Adobe Acrobat PDF Viewer or Chrome.

Affinity 1.10.5

Mac 10.13.6

Preview 10.0 (944.5)

Screenshots of what it looks like in PDF, export settings, and in Publisher itself.

Edited April 16, 2022 by OBrienDesignStudio
Added screenshots.

[thomaso]

Hi @OBrienDesignStudio,
Welcome to the Affinity Forums!

I am not sure what the two details of your .afpub / .pdf do show exactly, respectively why the gray line of the APub view doesn't occur in the PDF and what object exactly has an effect applied and what does not. How is the "Distress" effect created? It would be more helpful to see more of your workspace, in particular the entire layout objects + the Layers Panel.

Currently I assume the colour difference in the green is caused by colour space / profile + transparency. If you don't rasterize before export, does the export maintain all vector – or is it rasterized anyway? If you don't embed profiles on export then Preview doesn't necessarily use your document profile, unless you export as PDF/X (which forces an output intent). So, does the difference still occur with PDF/X (e.g. -4)?

[OBrienDesignStudio]

1 hour ago, thomaso said:

Hi @OBrienDesignStudio,
Welcome to the Affinity Forums!

I am not sure ...

Thanks!

I'm not worried about the gray line. That's just the page delineation from APub's Facing Pages spread view.

• I'll include a shot of the way the distress is created to better answer the question. See attached.
• The issue was the background color difference. This also appears to affect text though I may have accidentally stumble across a partial solution. It seems as through the embedding the Color Profile may fix it. 
  • See pdf_1.7_embed.png
• I believe it remains vectorized.
  • I'm using the "only rasterize unsupported" export option.
• Seems like it doesn't happen in PDF/X-4 but it just affect the color profile, even though it's embedded.
  • Compare pdf_1.7_embed.png to pdf_x-4.png
  • See color_profile_01.png for settings as I don't think I included that earlier