Why fonts were changed from Publisher into a PDF?

[DesignNorth]

My first 4 page Publisher document has text in Helvetica and several photos.

When I export it to a PDF the fonts get changed to what looks like Times Roman, but the font palette shows "?Arial". Of course, there is text reflow screwing up my layout.

Then, I tried to make a copy of the original file, all the text in the original AND copy document have the same text changes. Now I have to go and change all the text back to Helvetica in every photo caption! Will this happen again after I do that. How to prevent these automatic text changes? Very frustrating and time consuming!

[MikeTO]

Hi, I think you mean that the text is Helvetica in your document but a serif font like Times when exported. If this is the issue, what do you have selected in the Embed Fonts list in the Export dialog, toward the bottom?

But then you said all the text in your document changed. If this is the case, then it's not an export issue and the above setting isn't the problem. What font did it change to?

If you're using paragraph and character styles, you can simply update a style to change the font for all text with that style.

You can also use Find and Replace to search for all uses of a font, such as in your captions, and change them to another font.

Cheers

[DesignNorth]

MikeTO, Thanks for your suggestions. When exporting to PDR, my Embed Fonts shows "All Fonts".  I did change all the Times Roman(?) text boxes back to Helvetica the hard way... one text box at at time. Today when I exported that file to PDF, the fonts stayed the same. I'm happy, but what gives?

I did save one PDF that looks like the text is Times Roman. And that original Affinity document shows "?Arial" as the font. What gives?

IF this happens again, I'd like to know what the cause is. 

[MikeTO]

If you make a document in Publisher using Helvetica it should still be Helvetic when exported, this is about as basic as it gets.

Try creating a quick test document with some Helvetica text and export it. What is it in the PDF when you open the PDF into Publisher? If it's not a match, please upload the afpub and pdf here for review.

Thanks

[walt.farrell]

13 hours ago, DesignNorth said:

I did save one PDF that looks like the text is Times Roman. And that original Affinity document shows "?Arial" as the font. What gives?

That comment confuses me about your workflow.

You mention PDF, and you mention "original Affinity document". An original Affinity document, for Publisher, would be a .afpub document. And if you created a .afpub on your system then you would only be able to select fonts that were installed there. But your mention of "?Arial" indicates that Arial is missing in the document, and the only way that could happen is if the document came from some other system, or was created earlier on your system and then Arial was uninstalled.

So I'm both confused, and curious, what you mean by "original Affinity document".

[Pyanepsion]

Hello @DesignNorth,

If you include a file with illegal fonts, they will generally not be recognised correctly by the softwares. You should therefore proceed as MikeTo has indicated.

If you see ’? Arial’, it means that this font has been strangely uninstalled from your operating system, or that your system uses a corrupted font. I invite you to reset all your fonts on your computer. Then install all the free fonts provided by the manufacturer of your operating system.

In the meantime, you can paste all the text content of your 4 pages into an ASCII editor to remove all styles (including fonts, sizes, colours, etc.) and then copy the text from the ASCII editor into Affinity Publisher and start the formatting again.

[natecombsmedia]

Hi there, I am having somewhat of a similar issue. I recently finished editing a layout for book 9 of an author's series I have done all in Affinity, all from the same starting files to get my presets and layouts the same.

This series font is EB Garamond, which annoyingly has a huge swash on the letter "e" in its italics. It has performed just fine in every book by turning off the swatch and creating my own text style. Regular italic still exported just fine in this ninth one.

However, the author has a main character that speaks into the mind, which must be denoted by EB Garamond semibold italic for e-reader text to speech compatibility. I made a separate text style for that, which works as expected in every chapter. As soon as I compile it into a book and export, the swashes are back everywhere, and when I look in each chapter, the text style updates to swashes for final forms being checked.

I didn't know that or catch it in my general glance through of the PDF...since I had looked at each chapter in their project files, and already sent it to her printer, finding out the hard way when all the books went out with the worst typography I have ever seen. It has ruined the first shipment of books, and she said the second one was already put into production.

I'd be fine if it was just my mistake of needing to scour the final export for dumb-looking words. But, I just spent the night updating all the bad text and re-exporting, only to find my documents have all the swashes back again. I obviously should not be sharing an entire file of an author's work, so I'm not sure what to do, but it would be great if someone knows how to unglitch Affinity or this font or whatever is going on.

A few notes on the export I can easily share. All fonts are embedded. The PDF is x-1a:2003, which was once recommended to me to solve layer flattening issues in Designer. An individual chapter does export with the proper text styling. So something is going on with the Books panel again. That's where all my issues seem to come from.

[natecombsmedia]

Interestingly, I tried updating the text style again normally in one chapter and by clicking the "base on" feature in another, and both worked fine, and when I export the book with the first three chapters fixed, it formats fine. I also set the color profile in the x-1a2003 preset since it was blank. Perhaps, that means one file had the profile changed...?

I will do the whole book again for now I guess.

I hope I don't have to export the whole book after trying every chapter to figure it out.

[MikeTO]

Are you talking about the swash e in EB Garamond 12 Italic with Stylistic Alternate 1 enabled? If you set Stylistic Alternates to Default there will not be a swash e. I even tried exporting with the x-1a:2003 preset and it worked fine. Could you share a test document with a line of text showing the problem you're experiencing?

[natecombsmedia]

23 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

Are you talking about the swash e in EB Garamond 12 Italic with Stylistic Alternate 1 enabled? If you set Stylistic Alternates to Default there will not be a swash e. I even tried exporting with the x-1a:2003 preset and it worked fine. Could you share a test document with a line of text showing the problem you're experiencing?

I wish...everything is default on EB Garamond (since it was installed), except I am using 11pt (older typography rules). Mine shows Alternate 2 as one with a swash at the end, but my problem is coming from a different section. There is one called "Positional Alternate" and it has "Final Forms" as a checkmark option, which always defaults to being checked when I use this font. It only appears in the Typography menu when something is italicized.

I have actually moved away from this font for other series because setting up a new shortcut for non-swash italics isn't my favorite. However, the author loves this font, and Cormorant Garamond, our original serif-style font in some older series, tends to print too thin and sometimes come out weak. So EB is still a huge go-to for serif books.

So far, I have been re-exporting to check for the glitch every 5 chapters, and all is well. I'm at 25 of 36 plus two ending documents.

[natecombsmedia]

Here is a test with a single line of text.

Just a reminder, it exports perfectly fine as a document. It was only as the book file all swashes appear.

Test.afpub

[MikeTO]

@natecombsmedia Oh, the swash e when it's followed by a space. You can turn that off with Typography > Word Position Forms > Final Forms. If you don't like swashes you might as well turn off Initial Forms, too. That will fix words starting with a lowercase w, for example.

Cheers

[natecombsmedia]

4 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

@natecombsmedia Oh, the swash e when it's followed by a space. You can turn that off with Typography > Word Position Forms > Final Forms. If you don't like swashes you might as well turn off Initial Forms, too. That will fix words starting with a lowercase w, for example.

Cheers

Correct, I have been turning of the Final Forms and creating a shortcut to italicize with them off via text style. This works great in the regular italic and on an individual document. However, on a full book export, after I have turned them all off, it for some reason turns them all back on just for the semibold italic.

I've had one other random formatting issue too that only happened in one book and didn't happen in any of the others the same advertisement page is included in. Text got all squished just for one book title on that one page. So each file definitely can have its own quirks.

I think I ended up "solving" this one for now by just doing a ton of educated superstitions. I noticed the Text Styles window seemed weird or different, I thought due to an update, so I just tried the "based on" method instead of "update text style" for all the rest of the chapters. I also left at least one chapter open at all times because if I closed it out to just Publisher being opened, the Text Styles window would jump back to the top. I also exported every 5 chapters to test where the glitch might be. I tend to wait until the document is 100 preview loaded as well as that solved an issue in an older version. I also am exporting under a completely different file name as well. When in doubt, just slap on some glitch superstitions until something works 🤣 maybe that will help someone.

I guess my only hesitation now with this particular book is that she is turning the whole collection into special editions with all the foils and sprayed edges and stuff like that, so this one will eventually need a slight layout adjustment and I hope it doesn't happen again.

[MikeTO]

3 minutes ago, natecombsmedia said:

Correct, I have been turning of the Final Forms and creating a shortcut to italicize with them off via text style. This works great in the regular italic and on an individual document. However, on a full book export, after I have turned them all off, it for some reason turns them all back on just for the semibold italic.

There are several versions of EB Garamond floating around. I recommend replacing the font with this variable type version and trying again because I can't duplicate the problem with it.

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/EB+Garamond

[natecombsmedia]

5 minutes ago, MikeTO said:

There are several versions of EB Garamond floating around. I recommend replacing the font with this variable type version and trying again because I can't duplicate the problem with it.

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/EB+Garamond

I edited the post above for a temporary solve, but that might actually work with all of the Windows and Affinity updates in the last few years. I did get my original copy of the font from Google Fonts, but it was before compatibility with the variable versions, and it is a ttf. I mostly get otf files for fonts without variable options nowadays. Thanks Mike, you guys are always geniuses.

[Alfred]

5 hours ago, natecombsmedia said:

Cormorant Garamond, our original serif-style font in some older series, tends to print too thin and sometimes come out weak

Cormorant Garamond comes in weights from Light 300 to Bold 700. Why not simply switch to a slightly heavier weight than you were originally using?

[Twolane]

It sounds as though you have the same EB Garamond installed as I have. Select the italics you want to edit. In the Character panel, go to Typography and the ... selection. Under Positional Alternate, UNCHECK Initial Forms and Final Forms.

If I select 08 Italics in the EBG font dropdown, the flourishes disappear with that selection. It's a little less time-consuming.

Unfortunately, I haven't found out how to leave that turned off of all the italics, so in many cases I have to do it manually for italics in my books. Aggravating, to say the least.

[natecombsmedia]

On 12/16/2024 at 3:58 AM, Alfred said:

Cormorant Garamond comes in weights from Light 300 to Bold 700. Why not simply switch to a slightly heavier weight than you were originally using?

Because then normal text is a bit thick. I'd have no problem using the thicker weights for something that wasn't the majority of a book. I'm sure back then I used regular. Medium would probably do the trick, and regular isn't terrible, but for the last series I did it in, we got close to the page limit as it is. EB is just nicer, except in the automatic swashes 🤣

On 12/16/2024 at 4:35 AM, Twolane said:

It sounds as though you have the same EB Garamond installed as I have. Select the italics you want to edit. In the Character panel, go to Typography and the ... selection. Under Positional Alternate, UNCHECK Initial Forms and Final Forms.

If I select 08 Italics in the EBG font dropdown, the flourishes disappear with that selection. It's a little less time-consuming.

Unfortunately, I haven't found out how to leave that turned off of all the italics, so in many cases I have to do it manually for italics in my books. Aggravating, to say the least.

I'm not sure what the "08 Italics" refers to, but I just have one EBG dropdown. 10 options from regular to extra bold italic. All of them add flourishes without unchecking the final forms for italics. I'm just happy the bold ones managed to stay off after I tried a bunch of superstitious anti-glitch ideas the third time fixing them.

[Twolane]

Obvi my EBG is a different one. I have 14 in the drop-down.

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, Twolane said:

Obvi my EBG is a different one. I have 14 in the drop-down.

You presumably have EB Garamond Initials (background fill, foreground fill, and the two fills combined) which don’t seem to be included in the standard set from Google Fonts.

https://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/eb-garamond

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/EB+Garamond

[kenmcd]

EB Garamond various versions out there...

EB Garamond - (2014, v0.016) - original version by Georg Duffner
Comes with two optical sizes (8pt, 12pt), and small caps, and initials
GitHub: https://github.com/georgd/EB-Garamond  (OTF, TTF, WOFF2)
Originally on BitBucket: https://bitbucket.org/georgd/eb-garamond/downloads/
Fonts:
- EBGaramond-Initials
- EBGaramond-InitialsF1
- EBGaramond-InitialsF2
- EBGaramond08-Italic
- EBGaramond08-Regular
- EBGaramond12-AllSC
- EBGaramond12-Italic
- EBGaramond12-Regular
- EBGaramondSC08-Regular
- EBGaramondSC12-Regular

Georg resurfaced for awhile and then seems to have disappeared again.
Think he has health issues.
He discussed updating the fonts and merging the updates from octaviopardo.
And made a v2 branch - that was over a year ago.
EB Garamond Initials - He and another user did finally complete the full alphabet.
Initials Initiative Part II #136 - https://github.com/georgd/EB-Garamond/pull/136
Think it got merged to the SFD sources, but no fonts released that I remember.

EB Garamond - (2017, v1.000) - updated by octaviopardo for GF
Expanded the 12pt optical size fonts to five weights, with italics.
GitHub: https://github.com/octaviopardo/EBGaramond12  (OTF, TTF)
Fonts:
- EBGaramond-Regular
- EBGaramond-Italic
- EBGaramond-Medium
- EBGaramond-MediumItalic
- EBGaramond-SemiBold
- EBGaramond-SemiBoldItalic
- EBGaramond-Bold
- EBGaramond-BoldItalic
- EBGaramond-ExtraBold
- EBGaramond-ExtraBoldItalic

This is the version you get from Google Fonts - which has been updated to v1.001.
And there is a VF included.
Think GF copied his old demo site.
https://googlefonts.github.io/ebgaramond-specimen/

The version from FontSquirrel is still the original fonts.

Most of the OpenType features are the same, but not all of them.
And the 8pt optical size in the old version may be useful.
But the GF version also has some fixes.