Question about Preflight in Affinity Publisher?

[benged123]

There is only one thing coming up when I check the preflight before outputting. It says there are missing characters ... only the characters are there in the document, I can see them. What might this mean? What should I do?

[walt.farrell]

As I understand it, "Missing Characters" means that the characters are not present in the font you've chosen. If you see anything, it should be a substitution from some different font. That may, or may not, matter to you. It's more likely to matter if nothing shows up, but it could matter even if something shows up from a different font  

[MikeTO]

This usually happens when you select a character as you've done in some symbol font and then changed the font for the whole paragraph, either directly or by applying a style. It's easy to do and I do this myself, only catching it with Preflight because the document looks the same. For example, I use some symbols in my Publisher manual for keys such as Ctrl and Alt/Option and then if I reapply the paragraph style I will lose the font override. But Publisher still finds the matching character in the original or a similar font and just displays the font with an exclamation point in front of it.

[Oufti]

On my Mac, this symbol ⫷ ⫸ exists only in 2 fonts, Apple Symbol and STIXGeneral-Regular (that I installed myself because it's very very complete).

Thus, whatever the current font is, if I insert such an uncommon character via copy-paste or the character chooser, Publisher will use one of these two possible fonts to display it, even if it does not exist in the current font, and warn me that the sign is missing in the current font with the exclamation point before the font name and with the preflight panel alert. 

[Alfred]

6 minutes ago, Oufti said:

On my Mac, this symbol ⫷ ⫸ exists only in 2 fonts, Apple Symbol and STIXGeneral-Regular (that I installed myself because it's very very complete).

The ⫸ symbol is also included in Cambria, Quivira, Segoe UI Symbol, Symbola and a few other readily available fonts.

https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2af8/fontsupport.htm

[benged123]

Wonderful responses gang! Very helpful. I'm thinking I might just find some symbol-like text from the Times New Roman of the main body. These are just markers for the chapter ends.

But if I use these ... which I probably got in 'symbols' and I SEE them in the output PDF ... any chance they might disappear on the way to the printer?

I'm planning to embed all fonts/symbols in the PDF. I think it's already happening automatically as that's the way I set up the document (everything embedded).

 

 

[Oufti]

37 minutes ago, benged123 said:

But if I use these ... which I probably got in 'symbols' and I SEE them in the output PDF ... any chance they might disappear on the way to the printer?

 

Once they are in the PDF, they will not disappear — at least if you choose to embed all fonts on export. 

To check what fonts are embedded in your PDF, you can open it with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader and press cmd/ctrl-D (Show properties). 

In this document, I inserted the symbol via the Characters chooser and applied Times to the whole text — but since this triple greater than symbol does not exist in Times, the Apple Symbols font was used to embed the character. 

[benged123]

Your English syntax seems to be pretty much impeccable Oufti. Si je pourais écire en Français comme ça, je serais pas mal content. Thank you for this, especially the reference to Acrobat Reader ... I stopped using Adobe awhile back and wouldn't have thought to use the Reader to analyze what I'm sending out as a PDF.

I'm about to explore your suggestion at this very moment.

Merci milles fois...

 

[Alfred]

6 hours ago, benged123 said:

Si je pourais écire en Français comme ça

*Si je pourrais écrire en français comme ça