Solved: "An error occurred while exporting to..." Error in Affinity Publisher Due to Specific Font Issue

[nDorte]

I encountered a peculiar issue with Affinity Publisher where my document would fail to export after changing the font in a specific paragraph. The error was consistently triggered by the same paragraph, despite using the same font elsewhere in the document without any issues.

After some troubleshooting, I discovered that the problem was isolated to the word "outfitted," specifically at the double 't' characters in this word. When I changed the font of just these two 't' characters to Arial, the export issue was resolved.

This suggests that the original font may have had some form of compatibility issue or bug associated with rendering certain character combinations or glyphs. By altering the font of just the problematic characters to a more universally compatible font like Arial, I was able to bypass this issue.

If you're experiencing similar export problems in Affinity Publisher, it might be worth examining specific characters or glyphs within your text that could be causing the issue. Changing the font for these specific parts to a highly compatible font may provide a simple workaround.

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums.

That's interesting. What font were you using, and where did you obtain it?

[nDorte]

Thank you.

I was using the "Outfit" font, which I downloaded from Google Fonts.

[Alfred]

This sounds like a variation on the age-old problem of some characters in an exported PDF file being incorrect if the default ‘Subset fonts’ is switched on. The ‘tt’ pair is included as a ligature in many fonts (including Outfit) but font subsetting only sees the ‘t’, so ‘tt’ and other ligatures are omitted from the exported PDF file. If you switch off ‘Subset fonts’, the entire font will be embedded in the PDF file (making it much bigger, but ensuring that any ligatures will be displayed correctly).

[walt.farrell]

This is actually a bit strange.

If I install the static version of Outfit, and create a file with some text that includes outfitted and export it to PDF, it works without any error messages. So I'm not sure why yours is failing, @nDorte, but I think it may be a bit more than simply having the tt characters in that word.

What I find strange, though, is that when I examine the generated PDF using Acrobat Reader on Windows, I see some odd behavior. For example, if I had the text and outfitted them I can insert the text cursor before the a of and, and use the right arrow.

It jumps over a and then jumps over n and jumps ofer d and over the space and then it jumps over the complete word outfitted and stops on the space before them.

So there's something odd about what was generated. This uses a different string, but search for outfitted and you'll find it.

(Created with 2.4.1.)

 

 

outfit.afpub Outfit.pdf

[kenmcd]

@nDorte

The Outfit font was created for the outfit brand.
And it has Standard Ligatures which display its logo text.
Standard Ligatures are On by default.

There are Standard Ligatures for:

• outfitted
• outfitter
• outfit
• tt
• and more...

Your "outfitted" is being turned into a single ligature glyph.

Some work-arounds:

1. In your text paragraph style turn-Off Standard Ligatures, or
2. Highlight the text (that one word) and turn-Off Standard Ligatures, or
3. Insert a ZWNBS between the tt (which will break the ligature).

And then you will not have some odd looking tt in the middle of your text.

When you changed the font on the tt you broke the ligature.
Like #3 above.
(be aware #3 will break search, screen readers, etc. for that word)

You could also make a character style and do a search-and-replace if you have a lot of these.

Note: During the GF review process I tried to stop this from being allowed.
For exactly this reason. But it still got approved as-is.
Bad decision by GF.