Import greek symbols from pdf text

[greekLetters]

When I import Matlab-generated pdfs containing greek letters, the text surrounding the greek letters imports fine, but the greek letters are imported as curves. Any way to properly import these sysmbols?

[thomaso]

Hi @greekLetters,
Welcome to the Affinity forums!

Might it be that these characters were converted to curves already when the PDF was created? Then there is no chance to get them as text instead of curves when opening the PDF in Affinity (or any app). – Can you upload an example PDF?

[lacerto]

Is there a reason you need to have the (Greek) symbols as glyphs rather than converted to curves? I have Windows version of MathType from the time the app still came with a perpetual license, and there EPS files, too, have symbols converted to curves. I think that it is at least partially related to styling where lower case Greek letters in variables are by default presented in italics (while the Symbol fonts do not typically have italic versions). So what happens (I think) is that symbol fonts are converted to curves because of this italicization (and possibly other modifications that need to done to make symbols behave precisely in equations).

On Windows the MathType equations can also be exported to WMF files and then the Greek symbols are exported as glyphs, but for some reason they are left non-italicized when imported to Affinity apps (they import correctly to Illustrator and InDesign). That might work better if the variable styling is made straight in MathType Preferences but as they are now, they need to be manually adjusted or slanted.

On macOS, and probably in latest version also on Windows, the MathType equations can be exported to PDF but it may well be that the behavior has stayed the same. The EPS versions of MathType equations, btw, do not import well because Affinity fails to import Greek symbols at all (even if they are initially converted to curves) -- they work fine when imported to Illustrator, so cannot really tell why this happens.