[AfPub] Export to PDF breaks Combining Diacritical Marks

[Evgenii]

I have been patiently reporting this bug for V1 since 2019, and looks like it was not resolved in V2 (or perhaps I'm doing something wrong?).

Glyphs with combining marks that use anchors for positioning (and don't have a dedicated glyph on its own) lose their positioning after the export to PDF. The app itself renders the font correctly.

App:

PDF:

[Dan C]

Hi @Evgenii,

Thanks for your report - I can confirm this issue is still logged with our development team at this time.

The officially logged bug is due to Affinity not supporting 'morx' tables with fonts, which causes this issue when exporting.

Our dev team have confirmed that adding support for these font tables are unfortunately no small task and although this is something we do hope to implement in the future, we don't currently have any timescale for this - as our team are focusing on other features at this time.

I have updated the relevant bug report with our dev team for you now. I hope this clears things up!

[Evgenii]

Hi @Dan C! 

I must admit, I'm a little confused regarding 'morx' table, as this is an issue recorded on Windows, not MacOS, and none of the fonts tried have 'morx' table at all.

In the very first thread the issue was (potentially) narrowed down to PDFlib third-party library that Affinity uses for the pdf export. In the previous thread I attached the pdflib.log which shows that

Quote

the conversion code puts the diacritics before the glyph it is supposed to get attached to instead of after

which is consistent with the rendered look.

Perhaps you were talking about a different issue in the backlog?

[Dan C]

20 minutes ago, Evgenii said:

Perhaps you were talking about a different issue in the backlog?

The information I provided is an excerpt of a comment from our developers on the original bug report for the issue that has been logged against all 3 of your threads here on the forums - which can be seen in the 'Tags' section of each thread (AFD-1907).

Unfortunately I'm not personally familiar with font tables and therefore I can't provide much further clarification surrounding this - though my apologies if this does not align specifically with the issue you've reported above.

There are many similar reports of Hindi, Bengali, Thai & Myanmar diacritics failing to export to PDF from Affinity logged in the same development report as your report (AFD-1907) and it's possible the comment regarding Morx tables was specific to one of these reports, rather than a generic comment as to the cause of the issue across multiple fonts/languages.

The issue is still logged with our developers and is a known issue for the diacritics shown in your thread, as well as for multiple other fonts/languages - the exact reason for which may differ slightly between document/font/language, but essentially remains a known, unsupported feature of the apps when exporting to PDF at this time.