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disappearing characters in export to .pdf


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hi,

i made a document in publisher using 'georgia' as the standard font. after exporting it to pdf, i shared it with two windows users. they both were confronted by the same problem with words in which a double-f occurred on their screens. the ff's were replaced by spaces. no problem whatsoever on my iMac, iPad of iPhone. it wil probably only occur on windows machines.

i don't know if it's a affinity publisher only problem. maybe it's caused by the font itself (or the translation of it by windows machines). but i thought it might be useful to mention it.

i'll attach three files: booklet.afpub, booklet.pdf and 'example as seen in windows.png'; booklet.pdf is the export to pdf from within affinity publisher. the .png file was sent to me by one of the windows users.

kind regards,

jan van de ven

booklet.afpub

booklet.pdf

example as seen in windows.png

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This is due to Georgia not having a ligature feature (the liga code) but does have this ff ligature (and a couple others) in the font using the proper code point(s) and APub will fake the the liga feature.

It's a bad idea.

The font should have the liga feature so that's a shame on MS (Carter & Cone designed the font and should know better).

Mike

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3 minutes ago, MikeW said:

This is due to Georgia not having a ligature feature (the liga code) but does have this ff ligature (and a couple others) in the font using the proper code point(s) and APub will fake the the liga feature.

It's a bad idea.

The font should have the liga feature so that's a shame on MS (Carter & Cone designed the font and should know better).

Mike

If we fake it in the software should we not warn on exit that we did this, OR not fake on export 

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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2 minutes ago, Patrick Connor said:

If we fake it in the software should we not warn on exit that we did this, OR not fake on export 

Dave will likely fix the export for this. But I believe this only affects a Mac. The PC version seems to export these OK. It's not like the ligature characters are not in the font. It seems that for whatever reason the Unicode codepoints are not being used for exporting.

However, Dave and I had this conversation in another thread. Affinity applications simply shouldn't create a OT Feature code/capability where it does not exist in the font. There are instances where the Unicode codepoint for a ligature exist in a font but are actually empty slots. This causes a similar issue that cannot be rectified. I believe Dave mentioned that empty ligature slots will be checked for in the future at some point.

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Exactly Mike. Legacy Microsoft/Windows fonts have been notoriously bad in this respect and font hadling in Office apps leaves a lot to be desired. 

That said, MS has been releasing improved versions of their fonts such as Georgia Pro, Verdana Pro, Arial Nova, Gill Sans Nova etc., which come with OTF features such as ligatures, proper small caps, etc. 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/top-free/apps/pc?category=personalization\fonts

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7 hours ago, Goner__ said:

Exactly Mike. Legacy Microsoft/Windows fonts have been notoriously bad in this respect and font hadling in Office apps leaves a lot to be desired. 

That said, MS has been releasing improved versions of their fonts such as Georgia Pro, Verdana Pro, Arial Nova, Gill Sans Nova etc., which come with OTF features such as ligatures, proper small caps, etc. 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/top-free/apps/pc?category=personalization\fonts

Thanks, Goner__

I had forgotten about the MS Store fonts. I extremely dislike installing them. Having two places for fonts is simply a dumb idea and unless one jumps through permissions hoops are hidden & unmanageable for the user. 

But hey, someone at MS thought this was a good idea.

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11 minutes ago, MikeW said:

Thanks, Goner__

I had forgotten about the MS Store fonts. I extremely dislike installing them. Having two places for fonts is simply a dumb idea and unless one jumps through permissions hoops are hidden & unmanageable for the user. 

But hey, someone at MS thought this was a good idea.

Mike, I couldn't agree more about the "cleverness" of installing fonts separately to restrict them to certain applications only.

Microsoft has been doing this for some time with Office for Mac—for reasons which remain a mystery to me. If anyone wants to use the faces in other software (which is often not the brightest idea, considering that most Microsoft legacy fonts are intended for screen use and not suitable for serious DTP work) it's a simple matter of copying the font files from one folder to another... 

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2 minutes ago, Goner__ said:

...If anyone wants to use the faces in other software (which is often not the brightest idea, considering that most Microsoft legacy fonts are intended for screen use and not suitable for serious DTP work)... 

Yep. Remember Comic Sans' ubiquity in print work when MS thought it would be a fun font. Georgia is a nice web font. And I have seen it put to good use in print work.

But unless a system font is demanded for a job I'll never use them. There's just too many well designed fonts made intended for print work.

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Hmm. Works here and for stmartin. All I did was to select the text frame on page two, open the Typography panel and deselect Ligatures. Then looked at page 2 in Acrobat and it was fine.

I would suggest using Text Styles with Ligatures disabled, highlight the text and set them to use that style and then make a new PDF to see if that fixes things.

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3 minutes ago, MikeW said:

I would suggest using Text Styles with Ligatures disabled, highlight the text and set them to use that style and then make a new PDF to see if that fixes things. 

ah... i only changed 'ligatures' in the main menu (menu/text/ligatures/use default). i'll have another try following your sugestion.

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23 hours ago, Patrick Connor said:

If we fake it in the software should we not warn on exit that we did this, OR not fake on export 

If it looks right on screen, then the font must define the ligature code points else we couldn't draw it. I think Illusie is saying the same PDF looks different on different devices, which suggests the font is different on different devices. If so, then this isn't due to faking ligatures. The same issue would happen if some versions of the font defined the 'liga' feature and some didn't (because however they are produced, the ligatures are baked into the PDF).

When you created the PDF, did you embed the font? Embedding the font should ensure that if the glyphs are defined for you, they are for everyone. (At least if their viewing app supports embedded fonts.)

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i just heard from my publisher that the problem is solved after i selecte all text seperately and for every selection ste the ligature on off.

 in the main menit would be handy to have an option to turn all ligature in any text in the document to 'off' in the main menu.

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14 minutes ago, illusie said:

i just heard from my publisher that the problem is solved after i selecte all text seperately and for every selection ste the ligature on off.

 in the main menit would be handy to have an option to turn all ligature in any text in the document to 'off' in the main menu.

Ligatures can be a local, character or paragraph style attribute. I would recommend always using paragraph styles for layout work and using character styles for formatting within a paragraph. 

Using paragraph styles properly does make this a document wide change. 

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