Odd glyphs in PDF

[David Gamble]

Hi All,

I produce a monthly magazine and have recently switched to Publisher from Indesign. Apart from a little learning curve, everything has gone relatively well.

Part of the workflow is to output a low-res version of the magazine when it is complete and send to company called Zinio, who produce a digital version for sale on its newsstand.

Normally everything goes well, but the PDFs produced through Publisher are creating glyphs "where some letters are substituted for a kind of glyph that cannot be extracted as XML text"

If I turn off ligatures in the Publisher document and re-output the PDF, the problem goes away. Obviously, I would prefer to keep the ligatures.

Does anyone have any advice, please?

Cheers

Dave

 

[joe_l]

7 minutes ago, David Gamble said:

Does anyone have any advice, please?

Maybe unchecking "Subset fonts" in the export dialogue might help?

[David Gamble]

Hi Joe,

Unfortunately, still get the same result.

Thanks, though.

[joe_l]

2 minutes ago, David Gamble said:

Unfortunately, still get the same result.

What font (name and type) causes the problem? Ever tried to replace this font with another one?

[Alfred]

What font are you using, David? It looks as though there are some unusual (discretionary?) ligatures in there.

[David Gamble]

Font is GT Sektra Book and is an OpenType

Standard Ligatures is checked.
Discretionary Ligatures is unchecked.

 

Edited March 1, 2023 by David Gamble
Additional info

[David Gamble]

Have swapped out the font to try with another that also supports ligatures.

Same result in PDF. Ligatures on creates PDF with glyph errors, whereas when ligatures are off, everything is fine.

Thanks for all of your suggestions.

David

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, David Gamble said:

Font is GT Sektra Book and is an OpenType

Standard Ligatures is checked.
Discretionary Ligatures is unchecked.

Unfortunately, the trial version of GT Sectra doesn’t include ligatures, and the full version costs $75 per style, so I’m not inclined to make a purchase just to play with it!

Have you tried checking the options for both standard and discretionary ligatures? With font subsetting disabled, all of those ligatures should be embedded in the PDF file and should therefore display correctly.

[David Gamble]

Hi Alfred,

Thanks again.

Below is a screen grab from the PDF. The final PDF displays fine, but copying the text and pasting it into TextEdit shows the issues the digital company is having with the embedded text. It doesn't happen with Indesign, but I would really like to get stop using that.

This one is with Standard and Discretionary Ligatures enabled and Subset on output disabled.

[walt.farrell]

What you're showing on that last screenshot definitely looks like a literature issue (Standard Ligatures setting) and is usually resolved by turning off the Subset Fonts option during Export.

[David Gamble]

Turning off Subset Fonts didn't alter anything, unfortunately.

Solution 1 was:

Turning off all ligatures (standard and discretionary)
This fixed the bits on the screenshot where you can see strange glyphs

This didn't remedy the bits in the text where spaces are missing (fromthe, youwill, grownmassively, fewmonths, theirwords)
Strangely enough, these are all errors where the word ends or starts in either 'm' or 'w'.

 

Solution 2

Replaced entire font set with TrueType versions.
Ligatures back on and error occurs
Ligatures off and everything is fixed.

 

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, David Gamble said:

Replaced entire font set with TrueType versions.

What did you have before?

[Alfred]

39 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

What did you have before?

 

5 hours ago, David Gamble said:

Font is GT Sektra Book and is an OpenType

 

[kenmcd]

Grilli Type supplies GT Sectra as both OpenType-PS (.otf) and OpenType-TT (.ttf).
So he initially had the .otf versions installed and then replaced those with the .ttf versions.

Interesting that the .ttf versions apparently did not have the missing spaces issues.
Have to test that.

@David Gamble It appears the missing spaces issue may be fixed in an upcoming beta.

Still no word on the ligatures encoding issues... sigh...

 

[David Gamble]

Hi All,

I would just like to say thank you to all that have helped, or offered suggestions.

I remember transitioning a studio from Quark to Indesign v.1.5 over 20 years ago and that whole thing was demoralising. (It wasn't really ready until v2-3).

Anyway, this transition is drastically smoother in comparison and having this community around during this process is wonderful.

Thanks again.

David