Publisher PDF Export: Text loses FX

[Tankitha]

Working on a wedding invite and on one card I added a dark stroke for extra legibility:

And I want to export my PDF and keep the text vector, but the problem is...my stroke disappears:

(It also apparently changed colors on me in the CMYK conversion...which I'm less worried about at this point.)

So my question is: Is there a way to NOT rasterize the text and keep that stroke? Something I can do to expand the text? Working at a printer I have seen how vector text just prints much crisper than raster text. If the only option is to rasterize it, that will have to do, but I would like to avoid it.

 

[GarryP]

All of the Effects (Quick FX) apply a raster effect so the layer the Effect is applied to will be rasterised.

One exception to this is if you have “Rasterise: Nothing” set when you export. When this is set, the Effect will be ignored because you have told the software that you don’t want any layers to be rasterised.

An alternative, in this case, to using the Outline Effect would be to give the text a Stroke (Outline).

My attached image shows white-filled text with a black Stroke, as can be seen in the Stroke Panel.

If the application you are using doesn’t have the Stroke Panel, you can set the Stroke either via the Context Toolbar or the Character Panel where applicable.

[Old Bruce]

10 hours ago, GarryP said:

An alternative, in this case, to using the Outline Effect would be to give the text a Stroke (Outline).

I would term it a better choice, not simply an alternative.

[GarryP]

13 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

I would term it a better choice, not simply an alternative.

In this case I would tend to agree but I think it would be interesting to know which other alternatives would work better in other circumstances.

For instance, might there be a good reason why someone would duplicate the text, convert the duplicate to curves* (also merging the curves), and then use the Contour Tool on those curves instead? Maybe for some kind of special printing process/requirements?

* Because of known issues with using the Contour Tool on text, .e.g. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/183617-contour-tool-meet-text-text-meet-contour-oh-no/

[Tankitha]

Thank you all!

I would love to hear any comments on GarryP's point.

[Tankitha]

So, I tried as Garry suggested and added a stroke to my text instead of doing an outline FX. But ran into this problem instead:

All the letters had a wonderful outline upon export EXCEPT the L. It did some weird flip the vector thing. For reference, this is a true type font.

[GarryP]

I can’t remember seeing that before.

Have you tried converting the text to curves to see if that makes a difference?

Also, are you sure that you have removed the Outline Effect and didn’t just set it to 0% Opacity? (Make sure that no other Effects are applied to the text either.)

Would you be able to give us a full-screen (whole application UI) screenshot where we can see the Layers Panel with that text layer selected and the Stroke Panel? (If there are any FX applied we will also need to see the Effects dialog while that layer is selected.)

Can you tell us which font (and version) you are using for that text?

Would you be able to Package the document and share it here so we can look at it in more detail?

[Tankitha]

TLDR: It was wacko, took a lot of finagling to get to where the L worked. If you can figure out a simpler way, cool. But I think it was the font and I'm really glad I only had this issue on one letter.

Here is the file of the page having issues for you to look at. The font having problems is Corinthia, which is a google font.

I am not going to screenshot everything. The FX were removed; no longer showing on the layer. I did end up duplicating the text layer and putting the stroke on the bottom one because it puts the stroke around every character, which means my cursive was broken up, which I did not like.

I ended up rasterizing everything because I need to get it printed so invites can they can be sent out, but when proofs came back to me yesterday, I went bleh.

I will try converting the text to curves...did that. Still has the same problem. Moved to the Designer persona, added all the paths together. Still same problem. Then tried expanding the stroke and that's where Publisher wigs out. All of a sudden it replicates the weird inverted path on the L (and lower case e).

SO, I tried taking just the text, deleted the inner loop paths (see below) and then tried added and expanding the stroke to that...still did not work. I know in illustrator/Designer sometimes there's a direction on paths...is that somehow the issue here? That the path of that letter is set a different direction than the rest?

THAT WAS part of the answer. I reversed the path on the L and voila! it didn't break....

BUT, I went all the way back to see if it would work on the L as a whole...it still didn't with the paths reversed...also realized that after expanding there were two little artifacts either side of the top swoosh of the L and one at the bottom swoosh. So I undid, smoothed out the curves there, and re-expanded, and that's how I got it to work before.

So what I ended with was the original expanded text, with the original expanded stroke for all BUT the L. which I then took the original expanded (that did the inverted thing), cut that out of my white loopless L, changed that to green and used it as my inner-loop stroke. 😑 This should not be this hard. The vector now exports correctly.

2024-09-22 - Wedding insert cards share.afpub

[GarryP]

Thanks for sharing the document and giving the extra information.

Hopefully someone with a good knowledge of fonts will see this and have a look into it further.

Some fonts don’t always play well with the Affinity applications, and sometimes this is because the font is simply badly designed.

One bit of advice that I would give would be to not mix text with different fonts in the same Frame Text layer as you have done.

I would have used different Artistic Text layers – each for a different part of the layout – with Text Styles to format them similarly where needed.

That’s just a personal thing but doing so, in this case, would make it easier to space the different parts out across the page height.

It would also make it easier to diagnose problems as the problem, in this case, would have been with a single Artistic Text layer which can be edited/messed-with without ‘breaking’ anything else.

[Tankitha]

8 minutes ago, GarryP said:

One bit of advice that I would give would be to not mix text with different fonts in the same Frame Text layer as you have done.

I usually don't! But this little card I threw together really quick after designing the main invite and thought it would be fine. 🙃