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Symbols misplaced/missing in PDF (imported)


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Can you share the PDF and the .afpub file here?

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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Publisher does not use embedded fonts, so this may be the problem.

Acer XC-895 : Core i5-10400 Hexa-core 2.90 GHz :  32GB RAM : Intel UHD Graphics 630 : Windows 10 Home
Affinity Publisher 2 : Affinity Photo 2 : Affinity Designer 2 : (latest release versions) on desktop and iPad

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46 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

Publisher does not use embedded fonts, so this may be the problem.

For the avoidance of doubt, do you mean that Affinity Publisher does not use embedded font information from a PDF when reading in that PDF?

Is that always or only if there is some restriction indicated in the font file that was used to produce the PDF in the first place?

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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3 minutes ago, William Overington said:

For the avoidance of doubt, do you mean that Affinity Publisher does not use embedded font information from a PDF when reading in that PDF?

That’s correct, William. The Affinity apps currently lack the ability to interpret embedded fonts in PDF files.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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If you open the PDF which contains embedded fonts not on your system you should get a warning of missing fonts & possible replacements. I have frequently found that if I do have the fonts installed,  I  still get the font replacement box with a suggestion of, for example, replace missing font Constantia Bold with system font Constantia Bold.

But when you place a PDF with missing fonts it simply replaces the missing fonts with system fonts and this will invariably be useless. You don't get a warning of a missing font. Be aware.

Windows 10 Pro, I5 3.3G PC 16G RAM

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4 hours ago, PaulEC said:

Publisher does not use embedded fonts, so this may be the problem.

That is a problem than. I need to use embedded fonts. Strangely, PDF on the same machine gets some symbols misplaced, but on the another machine, many symbols are missing.

As said, on my tablet I see the PDF completely correct.

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I was so excited about Publisher that I wanted to buy it as soon as it gets release.

Not having embedded fonts within PDF import is now to big issue to consider it as a valid option. :(:(

Edited by myname
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I have made a test font, installed it on my computer, and produced a PDF using PagePlus X7.

I then tried reading the PDF into Affinity Publisher, and it worked well.

I then deleted the font from the Fonts directory and tried again.

Utter chaos!

However when I tried again choosing to substitute a font from the same collection, though not the one from which the test font was derived, it works fine.

Here is a link to the font that I used as the substitute font.

www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/SONNETRL.TTF

Perfectly legal to download and use it as it is my font and I give you permission to do so.

The observable difference from the font used in the PDF is the lowercase letter 'w' so that is a good test. The metrics are the same

Can anyone get sensible text by importing the PDF with some other unrelated font used as the substitute font?

I still have the font in another folder.

Here is the PDF.

William

 

test_publication_20190329_Friday.pdf

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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I work with music notation publishing, so a smallest font difference affects music dramatically. So no, there is no chance to substitute a music font, or -  you can do it, but it will make to much pain in fixing all problems.

I will see if I could outline all lines, curves and fonts first and than use such PDF. That would solve a problem but it is additional work.

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53 minutes ago, myname said:

I will see if I could outline all lines, curves and fonts first and than use such PDF. That would solve a problem but it is additional work.

In Affinity Designer (I downloaded Demo now) what is the quickest way to outline all lines, all curves and all fonts (into paths)?

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2 hours ago, myname said:

In Affinity Designer (I downloaded Demo now) what is the quickest way to outline all lines, all curves and all fonts (into paths)?

What would outlining them accomplish? Couldn't you just convert the music font to curves?

(Note, though, that this will make them non-editable as text, which may just give you a different set of problems.)

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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3 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

What would outlining them accomplish? Couldn't you just convert the music font to curves?

Other software calls curves ‘outlines’ and calls conversion to curves ‘outlining’, so I suspect that’s all the OP meant.

3 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

 (Note, though, that this will make them non-editable as text, which may just give you a different set of problems.)

You could undo the conversion before resaving, of course, but the PDF would be quite ‘heavy’ if it comprised curves instead of text.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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47 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

What would outlining them accomplish? Couldn't you just convert the music font to curves?

(Note, though, that this will make them non-editable as text, which may just give you a different set of problems.)

Yes Alfred, I mean to make them to curves.

I want to accomplish to make a PDF file that doesn't consist fonts at all. In that case I can share with other systems or users without being afraid that it would not display properly.

The music notation is extremely sensible to any changes in fonts (type, size, position). A little difference can make a total disaster in the score. Here, only lines are "lines", slurs are vector curves, and all other symbols are fonts. So if you make a small adjustment, the font will be misplaced (for instance wrongly attached).

scrsht 2019-03-30 at 12.44.31.png

Edited by myname
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Thanks for the clarification.

It sounds like only the fonts should be a problem, and thus only the fonts would need to be converted.

With a Text Frame selected, the menu item Layer > Convert to Curves should do what you need.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro, version 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 17.4.1, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sonoma 14.4.1

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2 hours ago, myname said:

I want to accomplish to make a PDF file that doesn't consist fonts at all. In that case I can share with other systems or users without being afraid that it would not display properly.

Just to make sure this is clear, the Affinity products *can* embed fonts into PDF files upon export.

Currently they will ignore embedded fonts when importing PDFs, as PDFs are currently always imported as editable and that can violate license terms of the original fonts.

They could probably use the embedded fonts if they had an option to place PDFs as images (non-editable) instead of as embedded documents, but for the moment they do not.

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1 hour ago, fde101 said:

They could probably use the embedded fonts if they had an option to place PDFs as images (non-editable) instead of as embedded documents, but for the moment they do not.

In order to place PDFs as images they would need to interpret the embedded fonts in order to know how to render them, and if they were able to do that then they could interpret the fonts (embeddability licensing rights permitting) when opening a PDF file for editing.

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Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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1 hour ago, fde101 said:

...PDFs are currently always imported as editable and that can violate license terms of the original fonts...

That is not actually absolutely true. Making a font with those characters is illegal for most fonts (but not all, depending upon the font's license), but editing a PDF with fonts as fonts doesn't violate all but fonts that actually cannot be embedded/subsetted. Even converting to curves technically violates those font licenses.

Consider Acrobat, Pitstop, etc. Can they edit the text of a PDF?

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Adobe Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat Pro can edit the embedded text, and can import embedded fonts.

It is pity that it is limited. As said: I was so excited to see another adobe-like software on the market that was as superior to them. I am so sad that I need to stick back to Adobe (which I don't like so much as I did 10 years ago).

The software should NOT work in that way, so to say: to interpret activity or legality of their users. It would be like not allowing empty CDs to be sold, because someone can make an illegal copy of music or data.

Only non-embedded fonts should be restricted to the import. If embedding is allowed, than there is no need to limit a document to import and open embedded fonts.

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3 minutes ago, myname said:

Adobe Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat Pro can edit the embedded text, and can import embedded fonts.

It is pity that it is limited. As said: I was so excited to see another adobe-like software on the market that was as superior to them. I am so sad that I need to stick back to Adobe (which I don't like so much as I did 10 years ago).

The software should NOT work in that way, so to say: to interpret activity or legality of their users. It would be like not allowing empty CDs to be sold, because someone can make an illegal copy of music or data.

Only non-embedded fonts should be restricted to the import. If embedding is allowed, than there is no need to limit a document to import and open embedded fonts.

Natively, InDesign absolutely cannot edit a PDF, not its type/fonts or anything else. It can place such a PDF and pass it through to a new output file of whatever type.

How well Illustrator can open a PDF for editing depends on the PDF. In general, AI is the absolute worst PDF editor on the market.

The main issue with using Acrobat to edit the text of a PDF has to do with how a PDF is constructed. Changing text can be a nightmare if one needs to do more than edit words. A PDF has no concept of paragraphs nor font features. It should only really be used to do slight corrections.

Serif included the ability to use embedded fonts in PagePlus/DrawPlus. It will happen in the Affinity line eventually.

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14 hours ago, MikeW said:

Natively, InDesign absolutely cannot edit a PDF, not its type/fonts or anything else. It can place such a PDF and pass it through to a new output file of whatever type.

That is true. It can use embedded fonts in a inserted/opened PDF file. That is very important to me.

I guess I have to continue with Scribus+Inkscape so far. It is not easy, but a solution.

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5 hours ago, myname said:

That is true. It can use embedded fonts in a inserted/opened PDF file. That is very important to me. ...

I hate to be nit-picky. ID can only place a PDF, it cannot open a PDF.

But yes, because ID can pass-through a PDF (as can other professional software), it does not rely upon having fonts installed as long as they are properly embedded in the PDF. This is what Affinity products currently lack. At some point in the future this capability will be a welcome addition for any/all users that need PDF pass-through (like me, you and about everyone else).

5 hours ago, myname said:

... I guess I have to continue with Scribus+Inkscape so far. It is not easy, but a solution.

Other than me really disliking Scribus & Inkscape for various reasons, they are valid options until such time as the respective Affinity applications can meet one's needs.

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