Open PDF documents without importing text as text does not work

[randomdude]

I am trying to open PDF documents in Affinity designer. I am able to do so, but the font of the text keeps changing. even tough i deselect the option to make text editable and to not select a font family to replace missing fonts Affinity Designer keeps on making text editable and replaces the fonts.

How can i just open PDFs so that if i do not have the matching fonts installed it creates curves out of the letters? or is it even possible? if not than why is there an option for importing text editable and replacing fonts, if it has no effect (at least in my case)? And it does not matter what PDF i try to open (created with PDF printers, export from word,..).

(Affinity Designer 1.10.6.1665)

[David in Яuislip]

Pre-process the file to convert fonts to paths before using Affinity. I use Ghostscript, a command like
gswin64 -dNoOutputFonts -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -o output.pdf inputfile.pdf
ought to work. I don't have a link but your favourite search engine will soon find it

[walt.farrell]

If you Open a PDF, or Place it using the Interpret option, you are opening it for editing and the text will be text, and you must have the necessary fonts installed on your system. That is just how the Affinity applications work. They do not offer an open to just import the text as curves.

David's approach is a good one. There may be other tools that can do it, too.

If you don't actually need to edit the PDF contents, but just view them on a page, then you might Place it using the Passthrough mode.