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Embedded fonts (copy)


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Dear Affinity,


We have been very excited about your products Designer and Publisher, which we have evaluated during the last weeks. As a music publishing company, we need very stable desktop publishing and vector editing software, and we try to avoid Adobe products (reason = subscription model, costs).


However, after some tests we have been very disappointed because of one reason: inability to use embedded fonts in a PDF if these are not present on the system.


As working in music publishing industry, we need to access all symbols in PDF documents in order to edit it properly. The music notation is very complex, and it is not so easy to swap fonts so simply. Also, many glyphs are created by users in the notation software which become not accessible in Affinity products. Sometimes it is impossible to find a font or a symbol that is used by music copyists in PDF documents created 10-20 years ago. Furthermore, music fonts on Mac and on Windows are not easily exchangeable - the same music font on Mac and on Windows have different encoding and different slots for symbols. In another word, the same font used for notation done on Mac, cannot be used within PDF in Affinity products when opened on Windows, despite the fact that the same font is installed on the same Windows machine (yet Windows version).


Therefore, we would recommend you to re-think about the way Affinity uses embedded fonts in PDF. Your software should not, in our opinion, consider legality, law-abiding or morality of users' intention. Your software should have characteristics of a desktop publishing or vector editing software only.
I hope that you will evaluate your approach to this issue.

 

Music publisher.

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Besides Music Publishing: Embedded fonts (not only in PDF but also the orinigal artwork file) would help significantly when moving documents inbetween computers, in my personal case, when starting work on my Mac and continuing on the iPad -- it's quite a job finding all fonts and installing them on the iPad before heading out.

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I believe the problem is, that PDF don't embed all properties of the font, only a part. They are not fully working fonts. There are also licensing problems with fonts usually not being allowed to be distributed in this way. I agree that opening PDF only without change (pass-thru) no possible is a hassle, but then again, other applications do not offer this option either. If a printer or other company requires editable files I would never send a PDF, but rather an indesign or illustrator file, which do not allow font embedding, so I have to send the fonts as well. 

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Whilst I fully agree that we really do need Affinity products to use embedded fonts in PDFs, I can't help feeling that saying "Your software should not, in our opinion, consider legality, law-abiding or morality of users' intention. " to be a little naive! As a publisher, I would have thought that you would have more respect for the law and copyright matters.

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Affinity Publisher 2 : Affinity Photo 2 : Affinity Designer 2 : (latest release versions) on desktop and iPad

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23 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

If you are actually a publisher, I would hope that you would have more respect for the law and copyright matters.

agreed

 

44 minutes ago, postmadesign said:

I believe the problem is, that PDF don't embed all properties of the font, only a part. They are not fully working fonts.

This depends in part on how the PDF was created, but I would expect this to be the usual case.

 

45 minutes ago, postmadesign said:

If a printer or other company requires editable files I would never send a PDF, but rather an indesign or illustrator file, which do not allow font embedding, so I have to send the fonts as well.

Assuming that you can legally send them; this depends on how the fonts are licensed.  That said, I would question any printing company that required editable files - if they are my documents being printed, I would want them to print what I created, they shouldn't be editing them.  If they need to edit them, they are not just a printer but are providing other services, and they should expect to need to own the same or compatible software as the original author is using if they are working with the files on a digital level; PDF is obviously not appropriate for this.

 

31 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

we really do need Affinity products to use embedded fonts in PDFs

I think so too, in the case where a PDF is inserted as an image rather than as an embedded/imported document.  I believe there should be a distinction to support the use of embedded fonts in PDF content that is not directly editable in the same sense that other content is.

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1 hour ago, postmadesign said:

I believe the problem is, that PDF don't embed all properties of the font, only a part.

Not really the case. inDesign allows you to instruct the PDF engine whether to embed the whole font or just the part of the font used in a given file.

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53 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

If you are actually a publisher, I would hope that you would have more respect for the law and copyright matters.

That is a quite offending.

What is "more respect" related to, to what more?

I don't want to take it on a personal level, but this is very bizarre. And there is no "if", I am representing a serious music publisher. Thank you.

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25 minutes ago, fde101 said:

if they are my documents being printed, I would want them to print what I created, they shouldn't be editing them.  If they need to edit them, they are not just a printer but are providing other services, and they should expect to need to own the same or compatible software as the original author is using if they are working with the files on a digital level; PDF is obviously not appropriate for this.

This reasoning is very common for people who work with publishing in a publishing software. Composers are not publishers, they don'thave a clue how it works. And music notation is only partly done in  notation software.

Outlining lines and curves, editing curves, object position adjustments, fixing colour, adding footer, pagination and title pages that conforms our templates and standards, combining with title and intro pages, adding ismn info, making pre-press pdf files IS NOT POSSIBLE IN A NOTATION SOFTWARE. So please understand that the way music publishers work is not exactly how other publishers work.

InDesign and Illustrator is the very standard for music publishers beside several notation programs. As a fact, the both Adobe programs don't have these limits what I have described. If Adobe can, Affinity could as well.

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13 minutes ago, myname said:

InDesign and Illustrator is the very standard for music publishers beside several notation programs. As a fact, the both Adobe programs don't have these limits what I have described. If Adobe can, Affinity could as well.

Serif, the company behind the Affinity suite, already can interpret embedded fonts in PDFs: they did it for PagePlus and other applications which have been relegated to ‘legacy’ status. They simply haven’t yet done it for the Affinity apps.

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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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14 minutes ago, myname said:

And music notation is only partly done in  notation software.

 Outlining lines and curves, editing curves, object position adjustments, fixing colour, adding footer, pagination and title pages that conforms our templates and standards, combining with title and intro pages, adding ismn info, making pre-press pdf files IS NOT POSSIBLE IN A NOTATION SOFTWARE.

What you are describing is not really notation but something closer to typesetting.  The notation is being done in the notation software and you are reformatting the output.

 

In any case, this would fall into the category of not just being a printer, but of adding other services on top of printing.  You did identify as a publisher instead and I probably should have clarified that better in my response - I would categorize this as:

54 minutes ago, fde101 said:

If they need to edit them, they are not just a printer but are providing other services, and they should expect to need to own the same or compatible software as the original author is using if they are working with the files on a digital level; PDF is obviously not appropriate for this.

 

That said, you are hitting a limitation of the notation software's inability to make the publishing edits, and I suspect that most of the notation software cannot export into a page-layout-friendly format, partly by the very nature of what it does.  Thus you are probably stuck with PDF and the limitations thereof.  (I would imagine a tool like LilyPond could bridge the gap to some extent, but that would probably be a lot of work for most publishing companies unless you can build up appropriate templates to apply - it is a technically superior approach, but not particularly user-friendly, so you might be stuck with the approach you have for now.)

In the case of Publisher as it currently exists, that would mean getting copies of the fonts involved and installing them, though as @Alfred pointed out, the potential exists for this to change later on.

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39 minutes ago, Seneca said:

Not really the case. inDesign allows you to instruct the PDF engine whether to embed the whole font or just the part of the font used in a given file.

While ID & QXP do have that option, they rarely, if ever, actually embed the entire font (one exception is for ePubs when the font permissions allow it).

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2 minutes ago, fde101 said:

What you are describing is not really notation but something closer to typesetting. 

...

In any case, this would fall into the category of not just being a printer, but of adding other services on top of printing.  You did identify as a publisher instead and I probably should have clarified that better in my response - I would categorize this as:

...

I probably failed to read that the OP is a print service provider. But even so, the range of services that a publisher provides goes from an imprint to, well, everything else up to distribution.

I work with publishers. I generally only do layout. What myname describes they need to do is standard stuff. Software used, when PDFs or other live text graphic format additions is also commonplace. 

One day Affinity products will/may work with standard publishing/layout work-flows. But not for now.

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22 minutes ago, MikeW said:

While ID & QXP do have that option, they rarely, if ever, actually embed the entire font (one exception is for ePubs when the font permissions allow it).

I haven't checked it myself but accordingly to a very reliable source, (David Blatner) the entire font will be embedded if you put 0% into Subset fonts when percent of characters used is less than: 0%.

2017 27” iMac 4.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 • Radeon Pr 580 8GB • 64GB • Ventura 13.6.4.

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15 minutes ago, Seneca said:

I haven't checked it myself but accordingly to a very reliable source, (David Blatner) the entire font will be embedded if you put 0% into Subset fonts when percent of characters used is less than: 0%.

Yes, and ID doesn't do that no matter the setting. In fact, ID is schizoid as to what characters are actually embedded beyond what is used for the PDF.

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Music fonts will take you to an entirely different world of pain, a much much worse world. I do agree that Lilypond would help but I would have to spend far too much time working with it. Music is one of the edge cases which can will totally break page layout.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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2 hours ago, Old Bruce said:

Music fonts will take you to an entirely different world of pain, a much much worse world. I do agree that Lilypond would help but I would have to spend far too much time working with it. Music is one of the edge cases which can will totally break page layout.

If a PDF can be placed without editing capabilities, like in Q/ID, there are no issues. Other applications such as XDP (or the less expensive version XP&GD) can open such a PDF for editing as it can use the embedded fonts. In part, it does depend upon the originating application. But nearly every music score I have opened for editing has been fine. And everyone I have placed in Q/ID is fine as well.

Heck, for that matter I just placed some scores in PagePlus. They placed just fine and went back out to PDF fine because PPX9 has PDF passthrough abilities.

These two capabilities (open for editing using embedded fonts and PDF passthrough) are simply needed and will happen at some point...at least passthrough will and I hope opening PDFs using embedded fonts will.

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On 4/4/2019 at 4:43 AM, myname said:


Therefore, we would recommend you to re-think about the way Affinity uses embedded fonts in PDF. Your software should not, in our opinion, consider legality, law-abiding or morality of users' intention. Your software should have characteristics of a desktop publishing or vector editing software only.
I hope that you will evaluate your approach to this issue.

 

Music publisher.

@myname PaulEC was referring to this statement in your original posting.  If I'm reading your words correctly, you are asking the Affinity team to allow their users to knowingly violate the licensing agreement for the fonts by embedding them in the PDF.  In a similar vein, would you look the other way if I sent you Beethoven's 5th symphony, changed it's name, and claimed that I had written it?  After all, you shouldn't consider legality, law-abiding or the morality of the user's intentions either.

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Thank you for your reflection. You have to read my whole comment. It will be waste of time to continue with this discussion. 

We were very happy when discovered indeed fantastic applications, but unfortunately we can't use it, because of this issue. Just one vote more for using embedded fonts in PDF or other vector files.

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3 hours ago, Fixx said:

This is technical issue, not ethical. Serif has told us they intend to add support for PDF-embedded fonts when editing PDF files. It is just not too easy task to program.

Good to hear! We would than obtain licenses for Publisher and Designer without one second to think more.

My secondary comment as the "ethical" issue was induced by another thread when a user motivated the embedding with "privacy concerns". Therefore my comment as such.

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