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PDF Export Text Garbled


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So I've been struggling with this for a bit, and maybe there is something basic I don't understand. But when I export my file to PDF for print lots (but not all?) of the text ends up garbled. 

The fonts are Crimson and Augusta (attached). I've also attached an exported file with garbled text. 

If I export it "flattened" it doesn't have this problem, but it is also like 50+ megabytes.... Anyone seen anything like this?

Turbo Draft 5.1.afpub

augusta.zip

crimson.zip

Turbo Draft Garbled.pdf

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  • Staff

Hi ThoughtBeast,

Thanks for the file, annoyingly I cannot re-create it on a new document, however I can recreate it using yours. I will get it passed on to development! However I would be interested in asking how you created your document particularly the text. Did you import it from an RTF or Text document?

In the meantime you can work around this issue by unticking the 'Subset fonts' option in the PDF Export 'More' options. It looks like the subsetting is going wrong and getting the characters all mixed up!

 

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Interesting how the text under the heading "The House of Usher" looks perfect. What font is that?

Update: "The House of Usher" was scrambled in my other computer.

Question did your font embed? Try creating the PDF using the bitmap options.

Thanks for your post. We often learn when we have to fix a problem. Because of your post I went through every amazing text feature that Affinity Publisher provides. Plus, I saved in a few PDF options. Learned a lot!

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When the PDF is created using subset fonts, a copy of the font is generated only using the characters it needs (to keep the filesize down) and embedded inside the PDF. This means somebody without the font can view the PDF as it is intended.

If you don't subset the fonts (but embed the full font it doesn't alter it making the text appear correctly. Under the PDF Export click 'More' and ensure your settings are set as shown in the screenshot below. This will generate a working export for you.

Screenshot 2018-10-25 10.06.37.png

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On 10/24/2018 at 6:38 AM, BobJax said:

Interesting how the text under the heading "The House of Usher" looks perfect. What font is that?

Also, what is the difference in the font in the following line? "Force an object into position or out of your way. Bend bars lift gates." Hmm. I did not expect that. I was trying to show that "Force" was clear, but the rest was not. But when I pasted the entire sentence here it is all clear on my screen. Is this line in my post clear on your screen?

Thanks you so much! 

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On 10/27/2018 at 10:43 AM, ThoughtBeast said:

Howdy,

Yeah, in the garbled version it seems that anything in italics or bold wasn't garbled. I noticed that if I copy from the garbled text and paste it ends up... not garbled?

I'm afraid I don't know what "embedded" text means. I'm sorta new at this. :7_sweat_smile:

Embed means that all the instructions for that font have been added to your document. So wherever the doc goes the font will show because the full font and instructions are included.

Subset means that only the characters in the font that are used are included.

Sometimes some fonts cannot be embedded:

https://www.google.com/search?gs_ivs=1&q=why+fonts+cannot+be+embedded

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  • 8 months later...

Man I'm wasting so much time on this. I've typeset 116 pages using Montserrat font. Yesterday I spent hours trying to work out why most - but not all - of the text is garbled on PDF export. I stopped using Subset. I use FontBase font manager - I've tried disabling it - removing the fonts, reinstalling them, running them from the system fonts, from fontbase dir,  getting them afresh from Google, all permutations. After about 2 hours yesterday I got it to export OK and although I didn't know exactly why, I was just relieved it was OK. This morning, I just reopened the same pub file and made a couple of tweaks to a picture frame, ran the export again and we're back to garbled text and me trying all the permutations again to solve it. Hours and hours wasted.

Windows 10 Pro x64 | Core i7-3770k | 16GB RAM | nVidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti | Samsung EVO 850 500GB | 11TB HDDs

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  • 2 months later...

This has driven me nuts, too! But thanks to the comments above, I tried embedding the whole Calibri font, and the weird characters have disappeared. But that vastly bulks up the file size!

This document came to me as a .docx,
which I am to post on a website as a .pdf.

So I took it from my Word 365 to .pdf,
took that into Publisher, removed some lines that identified the author,
and exported to .pdf.

I believe this is the only one of 6 documents (only 2 were originally Word docs instead of .pdf) to have this problem. It sounds like if it were in another original font, the problem might not happen.

The specific letter combinations that turned into something else are ft, ti, tt. I can't easily reproduce what they turned into, since I deleted the offending document copies.

Please, fix this.

 

​Sharon

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  • 7 months later...

Although my text isn't garbled, I'm having a similar problem. When I import into a PDF, I lose the italics in the body of text that was originally added to the file with copy and pasting. I checked, and the Affinity software is aware that the text is in italics. 

Interestingly, the text in the Affinity file that wasn't copy and pasted but is in bold shows up fine in the PDF. 

 

Ordinarily I would just dismiss the italics and soldier on, but I'm publishing an anthology of other people's work so that's really not an option here. Please help!

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