Affinity Publisher spot colours (i.e. cut contours) when exporting with .eps to Versaworks

[hcc]

I know .eps is an older file format superseded by newer ones but I print on a wide format printer and wanted to try and move away from Indesign (which - after years - still has no GPU acceleration on Windows) and onto Affinity Publisher. It's been great from a usability standpoint, however I have a serious issue with exporting that I can't really get around.

My printer rip software will only accept .pdf and .eps (.eps is the standard) as readable formats that also contain contour data such as cut lines and spot UV ink colours. When using eps Affinity Publisher doesn't respect the spot colours that have been set so none of these cut lines or fill areas for gloss or white inks actually show in Versaworks. .pdf seems to have the data but the vectorised bits of the files aren't readable by Versaworks. The only way around this I've found is to export as .pdf and open in Illustrator or InDesign then save it as an .eps. This is obviously a fairly big annoyance as these file sizes are unwieldy due to their physical print size and that they cannot be fully rasterised due to the need for cut contours etc.

Has anyone else had experience with Versaworks and the Affinity suite? What did you do to get spot colours showing from your documents made in Publisher? Am I doing something wrong with the export - I've tried many different combinations of settings when exporting and none seem to export in a way that can be fully read by Versaworks.

Thanks!

Edited October 13, 2023 by hcc

[hcc]

Solved

Got around this by selecting PDF X-3:2003 in export options as per this thread (though many say the same thing):

This really needs better documentation inside Publisher as there are a huge number of printers that necessitate pdf or eps export. Adobe suite handles this seamlessly so I don't see much of an excuse for the faff Affinity has caused with this one and looking back on these threads it seems like I'm far from the only one who's had this issue.

Edited October 14, 2023 by hcc