Problem Importing PDF from Pages

[Rabboks]

Help! Whenever I import a manuscript PDF created from Pages into Affinity Designer, the page numbers all have a ">" symbol next to them and sometimes illustrations do too. I can usually delete these symbols, but for a 200 page document, this is a pain.

[stokerg]

Hi Rabboks,

Any chance you can upload the PDF file here to our internal Dropbox account and i can look into this further.

I did a quick test with a 2 page PDF with page numbers and didn't get any ">" Symbols next to them but the page numbers didn't display correctly, so that's a different issue i'll have to log. 

[Rabboks]

I've uploaded a generic book template in both Affinity format imported from a PDF created in Pages and as a PDF exported from Affinity. On all the page numbers, there is a ">" symbol on top of the page numbers.  

Thanks for your help.

[stokerg]

Hi Rabboks,

Thanks for the files, could you upload the PDF you published from Pages, before it's been imported into Affinity.  This will allow me to log the actual PDF file that's being imported along with the .afdesign file as well.  I keep getting mixed results in my testing, sometimes it works fine and other times i get the >. 

I think it's how Affinity is reading the formula Pages will be using for the page numbers, but i could be wrong.

 

[R C-R]

On 10/25/2018 at 3:47 AM, stokerg said:

I keep getting mixed results in my testing, sometimes it works fine and other times i get the >. 

First, I have to say I rarely if ever use the Pages app & barely understand how to use most of its features, so I could be doing this all wrong.

That said, I created a very simple one page Page number test.pages document & exported it from Pages as Page number test.pdf. The page number was inserted 3 times, once as text in the body & twice in the footer, with each of them in a different font. Importing the PDF into Affinity Designer resulted in Pages number test.afdesign.

I did a few other tests with 2 page versions & with the different PDF import text options in Affinity Designer, but in all of them the results were the same: the added characters vary consistently by font, so for example Arial adds the > character, Helvetica Regular adds a colon, & so on.

Also, the Layers panel looks very odd, as shown below.

[Rabboks]

I've uploaded an un-exported version of the generic book template in a pages format. If I create a PDF from pages and open it in preview, it looks fine. The problem is the printer demands the PDFs be PDFX-1a:2001 or 2003 and that's what Affinity can do that Pages can't.

[R C-R]

@Rabboks, as a test have you tried changing the font used for inserted page numbers in your Pages document & seeing if that makes any difference in the PDF exported from Pages & imported into Affinity Designer?

In my simple test, the Arial font adds the extra > character to page numbers but other fonts add different characters.

[Rabboks]

Very odd. Maybe there's a font out there that Affinity likes and won't add symbols to.

[illusie]

On 10/25/2018 at 10:47 AM, stokerg said:

I think it's how Affinity is reading the formula Pages will be using for the page numbers, but i could be wrong.

 

hi,

i don't think you're wrong. i have the same problem with the greater than signs in the page number fields when the imported .pdf file is generated by pages (and the page numbers are generated automatically). in my case i used the font georgia.
in publisher i removed the page number text fields by hand. i thought the solution would be to make a master page with only a page number field and to apply i to all my pages, but that doesn't work.

regards,
jan van de ven