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]

3 hours ago, homeyJay said:

I hope that Affinity can sort their PDF output out but I don’t remember having these issues when I was using V1.x.

It was the same in versions 1. What the prepress personnel is expecting is getting a PDF with Illustrator specific layers (these kinds of PDFs can only be made by Illustrator when enabling the option to make the PDF editable with Illustrator capabilities); these kinds of Illustrator layers can also be created  by certain apps like CorelDRAW that can export AI files with objects arranged to root level named layers that Illustrator reads.

Note that the so called PDF layers (optional content groups) -- which Affinity apps, too, can create when using so called "Layer" layers -- are a different thing. Illustrator does not read these kinds of layers even if they are created by Illustrator or InDesign. They are for a different purpose. 

EDIT: Additionally, the "Layer" layers that Affinity creates, can in version 2 apps be multilevel and read back by Affinity apps (in 2.x versions invisible layers are supported, as well). Even if PDF layers (OCG layers) by specs do support multiple levels, and e.g. Adobe Reader supports them, other apps typically only create root level PDF layers, and flatten them to root level, if read them at all when opening a PDF file.

a) Multilevel structure with "Layer" layers in Affinity Publisher:

b) When exported with layers to PDF, works fine in e.g. Adobe Reader:

c) When read back in an Affinity app, the hierarchy is basically correct even if not identical than in the source:

d) When read in Illustrator, all objects are flattened into the root:

A kind of a work around would be exporting in SVG format as then the layer layers are read at least by Illustrator and Inkscape. But that would then probably not be an appropriate format for prepress (not e.g. being able to have CMYK colors).