Fonts in curves

[Eduardo Brito]

How do I open a .pdf in affinity design a document with fonts already converted to curves, to avoid the risk of modifying them when opening the document?

[lacerto]

As far as I know Affinity apps cannot convert missing fonts to curves at document open time. You would need to use either a PDF flattener that can do this (e.g. Adobe Acrobat Pro or Ghostscript), or an app that can do this kind of a thing, like CorelDRAW, or for free apps, like Inkscape, that can "Draw" missing fonts (convert them to curves) at opening time.

UPDATE: In e.g. Illustrator you could also place a PDF or EPS file in document and then flatten missing fonts within a placed object to curves, but as far as I know, this is not possible  in Affinity apps (you can rasterize an object and retain appearance but cannot keep vectors), so whenever you "Interpret" a placed PDF, you are not given an option to convert missing fonts to curves, but just get missing fonts replaced with an installed font (typically Arial).

UPDATE2: Note that if you have embedded fonts in EPS files, Affinity apps do convert text to curves (even if you had the embedded fonts installed on the system), because they do not support embedded fonts (neither in opening or exporting, in which content they always convert text to curves). Most often you probably get decent rendering, but not always:

[Alfred]

5 hours ago, lacerto said:

As far as I know Affinity apps cannot convert missing fonts to curves at document open time.

The font can’t be completely missing! If the PDF file didn’t include the font data, how would a ‘PDF flattener’ know what curves to draw?

[lacerto]

2 hours ago, Alfred said:

The font can’t be completely missing! If the PDF file didn’t include the font data, how would a ‘PDF flattener’ know what curves to draw?

That is self-evident. I was just using the term used by Inkscape, denoting fonts that are "missing" in the sense that they are not available on the system as installed fonts. See the screenshot attached in my previous post.

Some apps, like Xara Designer, try to use the embedded font when they open a file for editing, but as far as I know this is illegal usage (especially if you use glyphs beyond what was needed to render the included text, that is, in situations the complete font was embedded, and not just a sub set). Anyway, this is very clumsy and error-prone also in Xara, and pretty much useless these times that plenty of high-quality open-source fonts are available).