PDF Export anomaly

[Greenbeetle]

Hi,

When exporting a file to PDF, I'm encountering  blacked out areas of the drawing. Is this just an example of Affinity vector files being generally un-exportable, or is there a specific problem with areas such as this example?

Thanks for looking,

 

LM

 

Test valve.afdesign

[Old Bruce]

You have a Curve with no fill for the heavy outline that is above a lot of stuff. Move it below that stuff. I filled it red.

[Greenbeetle]

That's interesting Old Bruce, thank you!

If you wouldn't mind... Could you explain a little further?

Will this often/always happen when a heavy outline is placed on top, or is it just bad practice on my part? I take it it's not related to the blacked-out clipping that defeats exporting as SVG,EPS etc?

This is a small part of a much larger illustration, and something I could easily miss, so it would be great if I could get it right from the start.

Thanks again for your time!

 

LM

[Old Bruce]

One thing I noticed was that if I chose the PDF export preset PDF (Flatten) to your file I don't get the blacked out area. All the other Export options give me the blacked out area.

I am not sure if this is a bug or not. It is down to the Curve for the outline being aligned to the outside. If you make it centred all the PDF exports will work, but that buggers up the outline as it now extends into the ... "thing". If you expand the Stroke as it is you can then clean it up using the Layers panel and the Boolean Subtract to get a filled object that is just the outline. And that resulting filled curve will work with all the PDF export Presets.

I would think that "best practices" for something like this would be a set of rules so involved as to make English Language Spelling* rules seem straightforward.

 

*  To quote my foreign neighbours in their weird beige house, "I before E".

[Hangman]

Hi @Greenbeetle,

The issue is caused by a couple of extraneous nodes in the stroke which when removed allow the file to be exported without issue... There are a number of these in different parts of the artwork which just need to be tidied up...

 

and if you simply straighten the notes at the end of the pipe, this will fix the 'holes' shown in the stroke...

 

[Greenbeetle]

@Old Bruce:  Yes, I got the same result with the flattened PDF... Under the circumstances that may be my best bet for delivering the drawings. I tried expanding everything, but I was still having problems elsewhere.

 

@Hangman: Thanks for all your work here, much appreciated! The idea that loose, misaligned and untidy anchor points on the paths could cause a black fill issue like this is really surprising. I intend to check this out carefully.

I'm going to blame my shoddy art on working at speed in unfamiliar software (Illustrator user). My biggest gripe with Designer is the (to me) maddening and erratic behaviour of the snapping options, which appear to be focused on fastening every anchor point marginally off target every single time.

[Greenbeetle]

@Hangman: You're spot on with this... It took just one misaligned anchor point to cause the issue. Why it doesn't happen every time is a bit of a mystery. Perhaps there are additional factors at play with this particular outline. I did notice that the culprit had an off-axis handle alignment in addition to the extra anchor point...

Either way, it's reassuring to know that a quick clean-up is sufficient to fix the problem.

Thanks again for the lesson!

[Hangman]

23 minutes ago, Greenbeetle said:

Yes, I got the same result with the flattened PDF... Under the circumstances that may be my best bet for delivering the drawings.

The downside of flattening the pdf is that everything will be rasterised, so you will end up with a single-layer raster image which may (or may not) be what you want/need.

 

12 minutes ago, Greenbeetle said:

You're spot on with this... It took just one misaligned anchor point to cause the issue. Why it doesn't happen every time is a bit of a mystery. Perhaps there are additional factors at play with this particular outline. I did notice that the culprit had an off-axis handle alignment in addition to the extra anchor point...

Either way, it's reassuring to know that a quick clean-up is sufficient to fix the problem.

Thanks again for the lesson!

There is something odd about the construction here but glad everything is working for you now...