Ligatures is locked on in Affinity Photo and Publisher with font Palatino

[BlytheA]

Following is the text of the first set of emails with Affinity about the ligature problem. I have been going around and around on this for two months. Callum's replies have deteriorated, until today he told me to replace the "ff's" on thousands of pages, rather than Affinity fixing the problem. This problem exists with Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher. I work in an Apple environment, mostly on a MacBook Pro, OS Version 12.6

I will be forwarding the current set of emails, if this communication fails to manifest a solution. I remind anyone who reads this that this problem did NOT EXIST before Affinity started selling V2:

Hi Callum,

Attached are the files of a short essay, Grounded Angels (© Blythe Ayne) in: 

1.) the original Apple Pages pdf

2.) the afphoto file

3.) the afphoto generated PDF/X1a:2003 file

 

Please keep in mind that most of what I need Affinity Photo for is 300-400 page books, justified and in Palatino font. Grounded Angels has 7 “ff” turned into boxes.

 

My Process:

1.) I bring a document (generated in Apple Pages word processing program) into Affinity Photo. 

 

2.) Save it to afphoto. 

 

3.) Then export it as a PDF for Print – PDF/X1a:2003. 

 

It (used to) immediately produce a beautiful file, ready to send to print (PDF/X1a:2003).

 

It used to be so simple. Then, suddenly, there is a horrible, horrible glitch where I cannot turn off ligatures, no matter what I do, which turns “ff” (off, officer, official, affinity, etc., etc.) into boxes.

 

When I turn Ligatures off, it just turns back on. PLEASE FIX THIS. 

 

Blythe

Blythe@1blythe.com

 

Grounded Angels-Life in the Country–Blythe Ayne.pdf Grounded Angels (from Life in the Country) Blythe Ayne.afphoto Grounded Angels (from Life in the Country) Blythe Ayne.pdf

[MikeTO]

Hi Blythe and welcome to the forum.

First, you really should be using Publisher instead of Photo to create a multi-page document.

I have no problems exporting your document to PDF/X1a:2003 using Publisher 2.0.3. The word "off" is a perfect ligature and not an "o" followed by a box. However, I'm using macOS 13.0.1 and not 12.6 like you.

When I select all of your text and turn off Window > Character > Typography > Standard Ligatures, the word "off" is exported without a ligature. It says off and doesn't turn back on.

Your document has ligatures on so if for whatever reason you can't export ligatures, select all of the text in the document and turn ligatures off. You're going to have to do this for the text on each "page" since you're doing this in Photo with unlinked frames and not in Publisher with linked frames.

Cheers

 

[Old Bruce]

No one else has noticed the ! at the beginning of each Paragraph?

It shows up here when I copy the text from the Pages produced PDF and paste it into ... well anything. It seems to be a Line return and then a ! and a space

[BlytheA]

Old Bruce

Yes. It has been part of my ongoing complaint to Callum, the Affinity employee who has been surprisingly unhelpful, telling me to re-upload many thousands of pages and manually turn off the Ligatures on each page. Which, once again, before the advertising of Affinity V2 was not a problem. Had it been, I would never have purchased the product. And now I have literally millions of words and my entire publishing business muddled.

Yes, exclamation marks at the beginning of each paragraph.

Yes, ligatures ON and cannot turn OFF.

Affinity, your product is not market ready, and you have damaged V1 as well in the process. Please figure it out! 

[BlytheA]

 

Mike TO

This glitch/error behaves exactly the in Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher. I have thousands of pages that previously did not have this problem in Affinity. With the advertising of V2, this problem manifested. Ligatures cannot be shut off using Palatino, the font I’ve used to publish a hundred books, in four iterations. Affinity Photo and Publisher have ligatures turned on. I turn it off. It turns back on.

 

Turning ligatures OFF on each of thousands of pages is not feasible.

My process: I import the book's finished PDF (not created in Affinity software) to Affinity (Photo or Publisher) solely for the purpose of generating a PDF/X for print at Ingram, Amazon, etc.

 

It used to take 30 seconds to generate a perfect PDF/X.  Now there is this pervasive, impossible, glitch. 

[Old Bruce]

How exactly are you making the Pages document from which you generate the PDF which you subsequently open in Photo? I ask because I never see a New Paragraph being replaced with a Line return and and an Exclamation mark when I use Pages to generate a PDF and then copy the text from the PDF.

I guess what I am asking is how is the Pages PDF making these weird new paragraphs? Is it perhaps from the text in the Pages document?

[walt.farrell]

23 hours ago, BlytheA said:

It (used to) immediately produce a beautiful file, ready to send to print (PDF/X1a:2003).

 

It used to be so simple. Then, suddenly, there is a horrible, horrible glitch where I cannot turn off ligatures, no matter what I do, which turns “ff” (off, officer, official, affinity, etc., etc.) into boxes.

Before considering the boxes, I agree with @Old Bruce that we should consider how you're producing the PDF from Pages, and where those ! characters are coming from.

The PDF from Pages does not seem to have them, it's true. But both V1 and V2 of the Affinity applications create the ! characters when they open that PDF. So this is not some V2 change that is causing your problem. It seems more like an issue with the PDF you're creating, and if you were not getting it before then it's probably something that has changed in Pages given that both versions of Affinity behave the same way.

[MikeTO]

3 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

No one else has noticed the ! at the beginning of each Paragraph?

It shows up here when I copy the text from the Pages produced PDF and paste it into ... well anything. It seems to be a Line return and then a ! and a space

I'm not much for poetry so I just assumed the exclamation points at the start of each paragraph were something unique to some poetry layouts. 🙂 

A minor issue is that the ligatures copied from Pages are actual characters and not automatic ligatures, so Publisher will flag every word with a ligature as misspelled.

In any case, those exclamation points are formatted with 2722.2% tracking. Odd.

It would be nice to see the Pages file for testing.

[walt.farrell]

I noticed one difference between V1 and V2:

• In V2 I see ! followed by a long space then the first word when I open the PDF from Pages.
• In V1 I see ! followed by the first word then a long space then the second word.

[BlytheA]

Old Bruce, Walt Farrell, Mike TO

Thank you all for your studied and thoughtful 🤔 contemplations. Much appreciated. I need to spend some time trying to organize all your thoughts – when my own are challenging enough! I will note, though, that the weird exclamation points appeared after Callum did I'm-not-sure-what. They were not there previously. I mean, when I first started writing Affinity about the ligature boxes, the ! were not there. 

Again, previous to the announcement of V2, I produced numerous PDF/X files from my Pages PDFs, with no problems of any sort. The boxes appeared in V1 (but occurred at the same time as emails to me from Affinity to upgrade to V2. I downloaded V2 in futile hopes that the error was gone, but no. Still there, in Photo and Publisher. (I will attempt to answer the question re. how the PDFs are produced. But I need to take the time to produce a new file and note the procedure, step-by-step, though I'm pretty sure there's nothing unusual about my process: Open a Pages file, type in 50,000+ words, format, export to PDF.)

Is there something else at my end that suddenly appeared when Affinity V2 was announced (but began in Affinity V1), when nothing different in my process on my end with Pages? Seems unlikely, but I'd be delighted if something came up that could fix the issue.)

To add thought to the mix, here's a comment re. the exclamation points from Affinity's employee, Callum:
"As for the ! being added to the file on import, this appears to be a bug and will need to be logged with our developers to be fixed in a future update. Please could you provide a copy of your document that showcases the ff issue?
Many thanks,
Callum @ Affinity Support"

(I had already sent him the three files, as above, I don't know why he asks for them again. And, needless to say, something as serious as exclamation marks at the beginning of every paragraph being no more important than to be "logged with our developers to be fixed in a future update" is, IMHO, unacceptable. Is it not a pretty serious bug?)

More to come.…

[walt.farrell]

6 hours ago, BlytheA said:

(I had already sent him the three files, as above, I don't know why he asks for them again. And, needless to say, something as serious as exclamation marks at the beginning of every paragraph being no more important than to be "logged with our developers to be fixed in a future update" is, IMHO, unacceptable. Is it not a pretty serious bug?)

That's the way that the workflow at Serif is organized. The QA/Support team log issues for the Developers to examine. The Developers are the ones who analyze further and figure out a fix, and who determine the order that fixes are provided and the timing. Generally only the Developers know what is happening once the issues are logged. 

I can understand that, for you,  "exclamation marks at the beginning of each paragraph" is a major issue. However, if no one else is experiencing the issue it is less major than the issues that affect a large number of users. And that will factor into the prioritization of the issues when the Developers work on them.

[MikeTO]

If you could share a sample test file here, we'd take a look at it for you.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, MikeTO said:

If you could share a sample test file here, we'd take a look at it for you.

They've provided the PDF produced by Pages in the first post in this topic. Or were you meaning a native file produced by Pages?

[MikeTO]

28 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

They've provided the PDF produced by Pages in the first post in this topic. Or were you meaning a native file produced by Pages?

I meant the original Pages file. The exclamation point is a problem in the Pages file and not due to a bug in Affinity. I noticed that if I opened the PDF in another app, such as Apple Preview, that there was a hidden character before the tab at the start of each paragraph. Copying that character to TextEdit pasted in an exclamation point.

The formatting of the Pages file is the cause of the issue. Also, Blythe opened the Pages PDF in Publisher without choosing "Favour editable text over fidelity". Failing to select this checkbox led to all the ligatures being imported as ligature characters instead of as separate characters so Publisher is flagging many words as spelling mistakes.

I think that opening the Pages PDF in Affinity Photo is a poor way to convert the file to Affinity. It would be better to copy the text to the clipboard in Pages and paste it into an Affinity Publisher document.

[BlytheA]

Old Bruce

walt.farrell

Yes, I realize that glitches would be prioritized. If I thought I was the only person having this issue, I'd move away from then entire software and just say it was fun while it lasted. But I'm assuming this issue will ultimately manifest among a larger population.

Mike TO quote: "I meant the original Pages file. The exclamation point is a problem in the Pages file and not due to a bug in Affinity. I noticed that if I opened the PDF in another app, such as Apple Preview, that there was a hidden character before the tab at the start of each paragraph. Copying that character to TextEdit pasted in an exclamation point."

As I mentioned above, the exclamation points were not there before sending the file to Affinity. I copied the file from the email back-and-forth with Affinity. It "collected/manifested" the ! there. I think Mike, that you observation, "A minor issue is that the ligatures copied from Pages are actual characters and not automatic ligatures, so Publisher will flag every word with a ligature as misspelled" is closer to the point. (I have no idea what "In any case, those exclamation points are formatted with 2722.2% tracking. Odd." means.)

I've attached a new file. New problem: After importing the Lorem Ipsum into Affinity Pub, I wanted to do a "find" for the ffs, and every, single time I clicked "Find" under "Text" the program crashed. 

Attached:
Original Pages file
Pages generated pdf
Affinity Publisher file
Affinity generated pdf/x file

Very interesting result. Some ffs and some boxes.

 

 

Lorem Ipsum-1-11-23-AffinityPub.pdf Lorem Ipsum-1-11-23.afpub Lorem Ipsum-1-11-23.pdf Lorem Ipsum-1-11-23.pages

[MikeTO]

55 minutes ago, BlytheA said:

As I mentioned above, the exclamation points were not there before sending the file to Affinity.

In the PDF you generated from Pages, the exclamation points are there but formatted as white. They are almost certainly the remainder of a bullet character formatted with a symbol font that just happened to map the exclamation point character to the bullet used. When the text was copied into Pages and reformatted, the bullets were converted to the new font and for whatever reason made white. Nevertheless, this happened along the journey into Pages, and not when imported into Affinity.

1 hour ago, BlytheA said:

I think Mike, that you observation, "A minor issue is that the ligatures copied from Pages are actual characters and not automatic ligatures, so Publisher will flag every word with a ligature as misspelled" is closer to the point. (I have no idea what "In any case, those exclamation points are formatted with 2722.2% tracking. Odd." means.

I recommend you turn on Text > Show Special Characters when cleaning up these PDFs in Affinity. When this is on spaces are indicated as square blue dots as shown in this screenshot - look to the right of As. But there is no dot between the exclamation point and As, nor is there a tab symbol. If you select the exclamation point you'll find it's really, really wide, and if you then look in your Character panel you'll see that the tracking value is 2722.2%. The default tracking, and that used in the rest of your document is 0%. Once again, this is because the exclamation point is a badly converted bullet character from the original source. Now the PDF you generated from Pages actually has white space to the right of the exclamation point - Affinity interpreted this as wide tracking. Perhaps it should have interpreted it as a tab but it wouldn't have done it if there hadn't been an exclamation point there to start with. So if you see these exclamation points again when opening a PDF in Affinity, go back to Pages and fix the problem there.

55 minutes ago, BlytheA said:

I've attached a new file. New problem: After importing the Lorem Ipsum into Affinity Pub, I wanted to do a "find" for the ffs, and every, single time I clicked "Find" under "Text" the program crashed. 

Remember to open your PDFs with "Favour editable text over fidelity" selected. Failing to select this checkbox will lead auto ligatures being imported as ligature characters which will lead to flagged spelling errors. This is really important if you're trying to create an editable Publisher document.

I can't duplicate crashes with Find and Replace, it's rock solid for me. But I've seen one other post somewhere in this forum about a similar issue so there may be something going on with certain computer configurations. Just to confirm, you're saying it crashes when opening the Find and Replace panel, not when clicking Find in the panel, is that correct?

Please try some tests. Start Publisher, create a blank new document, and choose Text > Find. Does it crash?

Draw a frame in that blank document and type "This is a test" or whatever and they select any word like "test". Choose Find. Does it crash?

Try starting Publisher and opening Find from the Window menu (it's a panel so it's also listed there). Then open your document and try typing into the Find panel which is already open. Does it crash when you click the Find button?

Cheers

[BlytheA]

Mike TO

"When the text was copied into Pages and reformatted"   Text was never "copied into Pages and reformatted." It was originally written in Pages.

There are no exclamation points in newly generated Pages files. As I mentioned, the ! appeared after sending file to Affinity, and Callum doing whatever on his end. The problem is not with the Pages documents. I've now created several with no !!!  !

However, the squares continue, weird and random. Some ffs are ffs, some are squares.

"Just to confirm, you're saying it crashes when opening the Find and Replace panel, not when clicking Find in the panel, is that correct?"

It crashes with both Find and Replace and Find.

Please try some tests. Start Publisher, create a blank new document, and choose Text > Find. Does it crash? YES

Draw a frame in that blank document and type "This is a test" or whatever and they select any word like "test". Choose Find. Does it crash?  YES

Try starting Publisher and opening Find from the Window menu (it's a panel so it's also listed there). Then open your document and try typing into the Find panel which is already open. Does it crash when you click the Find button?  YES

And to be boringly redundant, I had none of these problems with V1 until Affinity started asking me to upgrade to V2. It would be helpful if folks contemplated the possibility that the problem is with Affinity. But if that's not possible, it looks like I'll be getting out the credit card and going back to Adobe. 😔 

 

[MikeTO]

5 minutes ago, BlytheA said:

There are no exclamation points in newly generated Pages files. As I mentioned, the ! appeared after sending file to Affinity, and Callum doing whatever on his end. The problem is not with the Pages documents. I've now created several with no !!!  !

This is the PDF generated in Pages that you uploaded in your first post.

Grounded Angels-Life in the CountryâBlythe Ayne.pdf

The screen recording below shows this PDF you generated in Pages opened in Apple Preview - the Info panel shows that it was created in Pages. I then drag select the blank space at the start of an indented paragraph and as I do so I see highlighting for one narrow "space" and one wide space. I copy that to the clipboard and paste it into TextEdit. This results in seeing the exclamation point.

I'm sorry, but you definitely have exclamation points in your Pages PDF. If you'd care to share the first page of the Pages document here I will look at it but without that document there isn't any more help I can offer.

 

 

[BlytheA]

Are my subsequent unloads not showing?

[MikeTO]

30 minutes ago, BlytheA said:

Are my subsequent unloads not showing?

The Lorem Ipsum ones don't have the same formatting issue. I'd like to see the poem one, just a single page or even a single indented paragraph should be enough.

Cheers

[Old Bruce]

@BlytheA, I notice that the Officer has an fi ligature in the Pages generated PDF. So we have O f fi c e r instead of O ffi c e r  or even O ff i c e r . I think the problem comes down to how Pages is deciding which ligatures to use and include in the export. The ligatures will vary font to font as well.

I agree with @MikeTO in that the original formatting issues would need the original Pages file. At least the first page of it.

[BlytheA]

Are my subsequent unloads not showing?

[walt.farrell]

3 minutes ago, BlytheA said:

Are my subsequent unloads not showing?

I haven't seen any since the lorem ipsum uploads. And as pointed out above, they don't help. We want to see the original .pages document, or at least a page of it.

If you think you've uploaded that already, please point to the post. You can click on the ... icon on the upper right of the post, then click on Share, and copy the URL. You can then paste the URL into a new post here.

[MikeTO]

20 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

@BlytheA, I notice that the Officer has an fi ligature in the Pages generated PDF. So we have O f fi c e r instead of O ffi c e r  or even O ff i c e r . I think the problem comes down to how Pages is deciding which ligatures to use and include in the export. The ligatures will vary font to font as well.

The Pages-generated PDF (Lorem Ipsum-1-11-23.pdf) has an auto fi ligature. If you open this PDF in Affinity with "Favour editable text over fidelity" off then Affinity will try to match the layout more and will give you a manual fi ligature, resulting in a spelling error as you indicated. But if you open this PDF in Affinity with this option on then Affinity will make it more editable and give you an auto fi ligature, resulting in no spelling errors.

This "Favour editable text" option is an often-overlooked PDF import option but it's really important if you intend to edit the PDF text in Affinity. I wish it was the default so that users didn't have to figure this out the hard way.

1 minute ago, BlytheA said:

Are my subsequent unloads not showing?

No, just the lorem ipsum ones which don't ave the same formatting issues.

[BlytheA]

Walt Farrell

Old Bruce

Mike TO

"I notice that the Officer has an fi ligature in the Pages generated PDF. So we have O f fi c e r instead of O ffi c e r  or even O ff i c e r . I think the problem comes down to how Pages is deciding which ligatures to use and include in the export. The ligatures will vary font to font as well."

1. Interesting. BUT! But! But! But! This never happened before Affinity started hustling V2.  Just … I have no idea how else to say this, which I have several times.

2. I cannot turn off Ligatures in Palatino. I've no intention to "edit the PDF text in Affinity." My intention is to do as I did before, which is to use Affinity ONLY FOR A PDF/X. That's all. It used to work. It doesn't now. Yes, I've turned on "Favour editable text over fidelity."  There's still ff boxes.

3. No exclamation points until Affinity fussed with the Grounded Angels file. (BTW, Grounded Angels is an essay, not poetry.)

4. Exclamation points are not the issue. The ffs as boxes is. It was not an issue with thousands and thousands of pages of Pages formatted pdfs, brought into Affinity Photo, for only and the express purpose of generating a PDF/X. Which it did until all the hoopla about V2.

5. Please see attached. ffs still an issue.

 

Grounded Angels (First 2 pages ) © Blythe Ayne.pages Grounded Angels (First 2 pages ) © Blythe Ayne.pdf Grounded Angels (First 2 pages ) © Blythe Ayne-Affinity PDF.pdf