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Handling placed PDFs with embedded fonts


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When text is converted to curves, the so called „hinting“ isn‘t preserved. „Hinting“ is a font intern, slight modification of the outlines, according to their output resolution. In other words: Printing in lower resolution produces a slightly different font appearance compared to higher resolution outputs. This is quite important for print results on laser printers or digital printing machines, which normally work with much lower resolution as offset machines do.

Therefore converting fonts to outline normally isn‘t a recommendable option.

Further information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_hinting

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2 hours ago, haakoo said:

Asking for the font from the client is also an option.

I would use Acrobat or another pdf editor capable of annotating a pdf.

My last issue of a magazine had a typical number of places as adding up to about 80 different fonts.

This is reason #17 why I cannot use Apub for work. 

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  • 1 month later...

I have two problems with importing PDFs.

1) Fonts are changed and often then the replacement font is too big for the space so the text is squashed.

2) Only part of the PDF is imported - text missing.

I edit a Parish Mag with adverts so importing the ads is causing me a lot of problems.  I didn't have this problem with Page Plus so why have you changed things???????  Annoying for me and my customers.

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7 hours ago, Wicked Stepmother said:

I edit a Parish Mag with adverts so importing the ads is causing me a lot of problems.  I didn't have this problem with Page Plus so why have you changed things???????  Annoying for me and my customers.

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, @Wicked Stepmother. :)

If you didn’t have this problem with PagePlus, why have you changed things? Why not continue to use PP until such time as APub includes passthrough and any other features you need?

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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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm running this as a trial and it's frustrating there's no feature for this so we have to use a workaround.. If your job is being printed in CMYK, lithographic web or digital, Open the pdf in preview and export as a high res Jpeg, then import this in. There is no loss in quality that a modern press will notice. This also eliminates any font issues, spot colours, layers etc. What you see is what will be printed, unlike a pdf. If we have to edit a file we then outline the font in Acrobat Pro before importing the pdf in.... annoying workaround

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 8/22/2019 at 5:09 PM, Alfred said:

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, @Wicked Stepmother. :)

If you didn’t have this problem with PagePlus, why have you changed things? Why not continue to use PP until such time as APub includes passthrough and any other features you need?

 

On 8/22/2019 at 5:09 PM, Alfred said:

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, @Wicked Stepmother. :)

If you didn’t have this problem with PagePlus, why have you changed things? Why not continue to use PP until such time as APub includes passthrough and any other features you need?

Thanks for that very helpful response - NOT!  I used the Beta version for a trial period and then when they put  the new Affinity Publisher and photo and photo on sale I presumed the Beta version would be removed.   I  believed that it was superior to PP but I am still struggling to find the things I used in PP - just not as user friendly as PP.  Very disappointed.

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  • 2 months later...

Hello everybody, 

I am new here and I started to use Affinity products right from the start, after they were released. With high hopes to substitute all Adobe applications, I also bought Affinity Publisher and I am now converting all my former InDesign files via PDF into Publisher files. 

Right now, I try to prepare a yearly magazine. In this magazine are customer PDFs (advertisements). Unfortunately, they are not placed as a picture but they are "destroyed" and missing fonts are replaced by Lucida Grande (those are also embedded house-fonts of the advertising companies, something, nobody has on the computer). The same happens, when I try to open these PDFs beforehand in Affinity Designer or Photo with the hope, to convert the whole text into curves or pixels.

So, do I really need my old Adobe applications again as savour?

How can I resolve the problem?

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6 hours ago, MmeBezier said:

Hello everybody, 

I am new here and I started to use Affinity products right from the start, after they were released. With high hopes to substitute all Adobe applications, I also bought Affinity Publisher and I am now converting all my former InDesign files via PDF into Publisher files. 

Right now, I try to prepare a yearly magazine. In this magazine are customer PDFs (advertisements). Unfortunately, they are not placed as a picture but they are "destroyed" and missing fonts are replaced by Lucida Grande (those are also embedded house-fonts of the advertising companies, something, nobody has on the computer). The same happens, when I try to open these PDFs beforehand in Affinity Designer or Photo with the hope, to convert the whole text into curves or pixels.

So, do I really need my old Adobe applications again as savour?

How can I resolve the problem?

I convert pdfs sent to me using pdf2png. Other workarounds are posted on the forum but this issue causes me grief as well.

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  • 4 months later...

The post started in june 2019 - nearly one year ago - and today the problem still exists. No comment from serif in the hole chat. And that at a problem that occures several times a day in a publisher's job. I have solved the problem by converting the PDF into EPS by exporting it with Adobe Acrobat Pro DC (don'T know if Adobe Reader can do it so too). Seems Affinity has switched on the indicator light but by leaving the slipstream there is not enough power to pull ahead.

Mostly I'm excited of the Affinity trio but sometimes I'm badly disappointed of it.

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  • 3 weeks later...

We have 11 licenses of the full Adobe Creative Cloud that we planned to start converting to the Affinity Suite once Publisher was released. The PDF issue makes it a  non-contender that won't even be considered until you can place a PDF into Publisher without having to have the fonts installed locally. There isn't one work around in this thread that would even be considered. Opening in Apple Preview and saving as a jpeg? Really? Not a chance in the world. Preview can't even display a PDF correctly if it has live transparency in it. Converting text to curves/outlines. Not in this lifetime. If you convert a PDF to an image your type is not going to ever be right even if you make the image at the output resolution of 2400 dpi. First you are going to have a huge file size. Also the text will still not look as sharp as an actual text object once converting it to an image with anti-aliasing. The folks at Affinity are losing a huge segment of the print world by releasing this product with this behavior. Unfortunately we're going to have to renew again with Adobe for another year next month when our current subscription ends. Hopefully Affinity can fix this before this time next year when our contract comes due again. Other than this one issue we really liked the Affinity apps. Just a darn shame really.

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