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Negative tracking problems on PDF import


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The PDF import functionality is absolutely splendid. A minor bug: text in PDFs will sometimes import with large amounts of negative tracking in random places.

For example, create a document in InDesign with some text using old-style proportional figures or small caps (e.g. with Arno Pro). When Publisher imports the resulting PDF, the styling is lost, and the tracking is set to –100% or more. I doubt whether there is a solution to the first problem, but presumably the latter problem can be remedied.

This situation could also be improved by providing an easy method to make global changes to the text styling (I suggested in the feature requests area that it creates styles based on the imported text).

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Pdfs carry no style information. That said, Acrobat does a good job of creating styles when exporting to a docx file if the pdf is nicely structured with hierarchical text sizes.

Seeing how no layout application does that, it would be kinda cool.

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Oh. Forgot to add that for changes to a text run, the glyph substitution for say small caps and osf figures are using a gsub lookup and underlying these text runs is the regular text. I am uncertain if the to unicode tables do point only to glyph IDs or not. I would need to check.

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Hi, I'm actually a Windows Beta User but wanted to confirm that large Negative Tracking also happens in the windows version when opening pdfs. As reported above, it doesn't do it for every pdf imported. The visual effect being that words run into each other without a gap.

I'll add a report in the Windows forum unless someone thinks there's no need because it's been reported here!

Simon Parsons

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  • Staff

@SimPar7

Welcome to the serif Affinity forums.

As PDF import and the text engine are both in shared code I think your useful confirmation here is sufficient. If you can upload/attach the PDF file to a post would help too.

Patrick Connor
Serif Europe Ltd

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man. True nobility lies in being superior to your previous self."  W. L. Sheldon

 

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Hi Patrick,

I've attached a pdf showing the issue.

In case this helps, the attached pdf was created by a utility called Wkhtmltopdf. In other words html was converted to pdf format. I have successfully used this process to create many pdf reports.

It reads perfectly well in Adobe Reader and my default pdf application Foxit PhantomPDF

Simon

Andrew Report Truncated.pdf

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