AD industry standard PDF output. Is it possible?

[homeyJay]

I love the Affinity suite. I’ve used it for a few years now but over the past few months I’ve found that nearly every printer that I’m sending PDF files to is coming back saying that they’re unusable when imported back into Illustrator (which they ALL use) for pre-press.

When the pdf is opened in Illustrator, all they see are a baffling set of clip groups, nested layers, no transparency etc. 
Pre-Press departments don’t have the time or the inclination to deal with a 50 layer document that should really be a 7 layer, well labelled and organised pdf and so they reject it.
Strangely, when the pdf is opened in Acrobat viewer on my Mac, the layers are there and readable but sadly not in Illustrator at the print shop.

Sadly, after a few years of using the Affinity Suite and feeling like there’s finally an alternative, I’ve had to return to reality and subscribe to Creative Cloud because I need to eat. 
My last two jobs that were done on AD and rejected by 2 printers have now been submitted using Illustrator and printed with no issues whatsoever.
I hope that Affinity can sort their PDF output out but I don’t remember having these issues when I was using V1.x.

 

[lacerto]

Obsolete.