Publisher problem with placed PDF

[wonderings]

So been doing some tests here and there, comparing it to Indesign (my main app of use). I have a 180pg text book created in Word. Not the best place to create PDF's but I have never had issues with PDF's made from office and placed in Indesign or any other software for imposing or printing. Publisher completely mucks it up. This is a screen shot with side by side Indesign view of the page and Publishers view of the page:

Screen Shot 2018-09-01 at 9.44.22 AM by B P, on Flickr

 

Not sure if anyone else is having an issues with PDF's placed in Publisher, I have only tried the worst of the files to see how it handles it.

[Chris_K]

HI wonderings

Are you able to attach an example PDF you are having the issue with for us to look into at all?

Thanks

[Fixx]

Did you produce the Word document by yourself? It is very easy to produce a PDF from word which displays just fine as PDF but gets all character mappings and type encodings wrong when opened as editable in different system.

[wonderings]

I cannot attach a PDF unfortunately, not my file to distribute. 

I did not create the PDF myself. When I looked at the properties it says it was created in Microsoft Word.

I did not open it as an edible file in Publisher, I simply placed the file.

I agree it is very easy to make PDF's from Word and from experience I have never seen this happen to a PDF. 

 

[wonderings]

Here is another screen shot showing a PDF in Publisher and Indesign.

Screen Shot 2018-09-14 at 9.27.12 AM by B P, on Flickr 

I have also extracted a single page from the PDF (same page as the preview above) for others to test and see if the same issue is happening on their end.

test page.pdf

[MikeW]

That would likely be due to both encoding and the fact that even if you place a PDF in APub, it is still editable (Edit button on the context menu or via double-clicking on it). Affinity applications cannot really use the embedded fonts.

[wonderings]

39 minutes ago, MikeW said:

That would likely be due to both encoding and the fact that even if you place a PDF in APub, it is still editable (Edit button on the context menu or via double-clicking on it). Affinity applications cannot really use the embedded fonts.

Then it is something that definitely needs to be changed. While it is nice to be able to edit a PDF if I have to, the majority of times it is not needed. 

Personally I am not a big fan of editing a PDF in a program that did not create it. I do on occasion but only when I am stuck and need to try and make something work. 

[MikeW]

3 minutes ago, wonderings said:

Then it is something that definitely needs to be changed. While it is nice to be able to edit a PDF if I have to, the majority of times it is not needed. 

Personally I am not a big fan of editing a PDF in a program that did not create it. I do on occasion but only when I am stuck and need to try and make something work. 

I suspect PDF Pass-through will come at some point. PagePlus had it in the end, but it doesn't work well enough, and not at all with your PDF sample. Looks good on the page but fails at exporting back to a new PDF. There were/are other issues with it as well, especially with PDFs from InDesign. Serif needs to make it right this time in Affinity applications.