Glitchy images in exported PDFs on M1 Macbook Pro

[niklaskoelln]

Hello everyone,

I have a problem with Affinity Publisher’s PDF export that makes it virtually impossible to generate print-ready PDFs. The images in my exported PDFs often—though not always—appear “glitched”, with distorted or black bars appearing mostly in the upper half of the image. I have included a comparison screenshot that shows you the faulty result of the PDF export vs. how it should look like. I have also attached both the faulty and correct PDF.

I do not know exactly what causes this problem to happen, but here is everything you might need to know about it:

• I only encounter this problem on my Macbook Pro (2021) with M1 Max. When I export the same document through Intel-based Macs or Windows machines, the problem does not occur.
• I’m running the latest version of macOS and Publisher 2.2.1. However, I’ve had this problem ever since I got this Macbook in late 2021, meaning this problem also existed in Publisher 1.x (I finally got around to posting this here 🫠)
• Not all images are affected. On some documents, none are affected at all.
• I played around with the PDF export settings quite a bit and different settings do lead to different results. Exporting a PDF for screens, for example, made the problem go away … but only on one document that I tested. Weird.

My guess would be that this problem is caused by PDFlib, which to my understanding is the library used by Publisher to generate PDFs on macOS. Maybe there is a bug related to PDFlib on certain Apple Silicon machines? Though the problem might be something completely different and this may just be a shot in the dark.

Any help on this is greatly appreciated! Right now, I have to export any PDF that I need to have printed through my secondary Windows machine, which is obviously far from ideal.

Thank you,
Niklas

correct.pdf faulty.pdf

[thomaso]

Image artefacts or corruption can possibly get avoided by disabling "Hardware Acceleration" in the app Preferences > Performance.

[lacerto]

Obsolete.

[niklaskoelln]

19 hours ago, thomaso said:

Image artefacts or corruption can possibly get avoided by disabling "Hardware Acceleration" in the app Preferences > Performance.

This seems to have fixed it, thank you! Still curious why this problem exists, I hope the devs will eventually find a fix for this 😅