embedded subsets

[radeg]

I am sorry if this is not a relevant issue, or if I have misunderstood something. I am running Affinity Designer 1.6.5 on a Mac with El Capitan:

I have made a figure (an illustration for an article) that contains text in different fonts. Then I exported this figure as a pdf file with all fonts embedded as subsets. When I check this pdf in Acrobat, all fonts are there as subsets, just as intended. The pdf can also be opened in Affinity Designer with no problems.

Now, use this pdf as an inserted object in a word processor like Word, Nisus Writer Pro or Mellel. Then print the article to pdf from the word processor. The new pdf file looks fine in Preview and Acrobat; but Acrobat reveals that all fonts that were embedded in the figure, now have the same cryptic name, e.g. “font0000000022523ae5”. If the new article pdf is opened with Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Designer, they will complain that the font “font0000000022523ae5” is missing. Affinity Designer will allow me to select a replacement font, but only one for all of the figure text.

The thing is, my previous workflow involved making the original pdf, the one with the figure, with an old version of Illustrator, and with Preview to assist. When these pdf’s are used as inserted objects in a word processor, the final article pdf works quite fine, and no fonts are “missing”.

I wonder why there is such a difference.

The obvious workaround, just to be on the safe side, is to convert all text to curves when exporting the illustration pdf. This will look fine when printed on professional equipment, though is has some disavantages when sharing manuscripts or printing them on ordinary office printers.

Also observed: If the original pdf export from Affinity Designer embeds the complete fonts (not subsets), then no fonts are reported as “missing” in the final article pdf. And if Adobe InDesign is used instead of a word processor (with embedded subsets in the original figure pdf), then the exported final article pdf will open fine in Affinity Designer, while Illustrator will outline any text used in the figure.

 

[stokerg]

Hi radeg and Welcome to the Forums,

Sounds like MS Word is renaming the fonts when creating the PDF, as everything is fine until Word recreates the PDF. 

I tried to replicate this using a PDF i created in Designer and inserted into Word as an object, but i can't seem to stop it from out putting it as an image in the PDF  

[R C-R]

15 hours ago, radeg said:

Now, use this pdf as an inserted object in a word processor like Word, Nisus Writer Pro or Mellel.

Of the 3 I only have Nisus Writer Pro. I use it rarely so I may have missed something, but the only way I have found to insert a PDF file into it is as an image object -- IOW, no individual text or other editable objects, just as a raster image.

[radeg]

stokerg: Thank you for your welcoming words. And yes, it seems like something happens when printing the final article PDF. The strange thing is that this renaming occurs only if the original pdf was exported from Affinity Designer, and only if the embedded fonts are limited to subsets during that export. If the full fonts are embedded, the renaming does not happen. Sorry about your Word test. I just tried TextEdit, and the result is the same there.

R C-R: Yes, that is also the way I have inserted the PDF in Nisus Writer Pro version 2 (⇧⌘I), but on my Macs, the inserted PDF does not get rasterised. In NWP version 3, drag-and-drop works even for PDF’s.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, radeg said:

R C-R: Yes, that is also the way I have inserted the PDF in Nisus Writer Pro version 2 (⇧⌘I), but on my Macs, the inserted PDF does not get rasterised. In NWP version 3, drag-and-drop works even for PDF’s.

I only have version 2, but if the behavior is different in the two versions, wouldn't that imply the the problem could be in how NWP inserts PDF's rather than in how Affinity exports them?

Also, FWIW if I open a PDF file directly into NWP 2, text comes in as editable text, but it is stripped of its placement in the PDF, so each text object is just a line of text, one after the other.

[radeg]

40 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I only have version 2, but if the behavior is different in the two versions, wouldn't that imply the the problem could be in how NWP inserts PDF's rather than in how Affinity exports them?

Also, FWIW if I open a PDF file directly into NWP 2, text comes in as editable text, but it is stripped of its placement in the PDF, so each text object is just a line of text, one after the other.

Yes, you are totally correct about the editable text in NWP. And this is still the behaviour in version 3. My statement above about version 3 and drag-and-drop is wrong. I probably allowed myself to be misled by the layout in my test document.

Nevertheless: Yes, I would assume that since printing to PDF (i.e. saving as PDF from the print dialogue) from any of the tested programs (Nisus, Word, Mellel, TextEdit) uses the OS, it is the OS that renames the embedded fonts, not Affinity Designer. So the OS, then, not NWP in itself. I have also tried PDFwriter for Mac, though, and in NWP I have tried “Export as PDF”, and they both give the same result as saving as PDF from the Mac’s print dialogue.

Therefore, perhaps the question may be why the fonts are merged and renamed to something cryptic, and are reported as “missing”, only when the original PDF comes from Affinity Designer (still, only when the fonts are embedded as subsets), and not when the orginal PDF comes from Illustrator, from an Illustrator EPS converted to PDF by Preview or, as I just tested, from OmniGraffle’s PDF export, or from OmniGraffle with a paste into Preview.

[stokerg]

From my understanding when it comes to file formats, we stick the file formats specification.  Which Adobe confirms with our outputted PDF.  I can't a PDF insert as anything but an image.  Can you set up a couple of test files to share, just for curiosity reasons more than anything, still sounds like a MS/editor issue to me.  If when you checked the PDF we outputted had garbled font names, then i'd happily say it was us at fault.  Either way i can at least get QA to take a look at this thread to make sure we are not missing anything as with Publisher coming soon PDF is going to be a big part of it, so get it right in one app, all apps benefit  

[radeg]

1 hour ago, stokerg said:

Can you set up a couple of test files to share, just for curiosity reasons more than anything, still sounds like a MS/editor issue to me.

Attached: PDF’s generated in different ways (as described by file names and contents), and in addition a PDF from Nisus Writer Pro where these files have been embedded. The nisus.pdf was made by saving to PDF from the print dialogue.

ad-fullfonts.pdf

ad-subsets.pdf

ai-eps-converted-to-pdf-by-preview.pdf

ai-subsets.pdf

nisus.pdf