Publisher Export to PDF text all garbled

[DHM]

This is a nightmare. PDF export just mangles all the text - well not all of it, just most of it. Randomly it leaves bits ok even with exactly the same font, styles, colours, weights,  and the same master objects applied  - you can see in the screenshots one spread in the doc is ok and one is not (most aren;t) . Some headings are ok but body text is mashed. There's no logic to this, nothing consistent about why and how it fails.

Publisher came out just in time for me to start these two jobs with a hard print deadline. After 2 - 3 days of arsing about trying to fix this problem after setting 120 pages, I thought I'd finally solved this by stopping using my FontBase font manager, removing all the Montserrat font versions and reinstalling them to system fonts and trying again for the upteenth time. So I started the other doc. But it's back again.  The problem is, every time I do this reinstalling fonts process, the document seems to interpret the fonts as new fonts, substituting the old, then I have to go through and set everything again. Like hundreds of Latin names in italic in the body copy I will have to go through and manually do again and again, every time it happens. And many more issues besides will need to be addressed again.

This is a real problem. I see someone else has it to - I commented on that thread days back but there's no response on there. This is Windows 10 Pro, Montserrat (Google font) - marked as fully embeddable. I tried turning off the subset option on exports dozens of times and it makes no difference. It's extended this job into days more than it should have been.

I really like what you're trying to do with this suite of software but please please please get this sorted - people are trying to produce pro documents for print but we're falling at the last hurdle. It's pretty crashy too but the recovery so far has been reasonably good. Plenty of other niggles with things but  the PDF export thing really really needs sorting though. Please can somebody look into this urgently?

[Alfred]

What does the document info for the PDFs say about the encoding for the fonts?

[DHM]

Hi Alfred - it's as per the attached

[DHM]

[DHM]

I don't get how the font can render ok on one spread but not on the other 24 spreads when they're built from exactly the same master and styles

[Alfred]

55 minutes ago, DHM said:

I don't get how the font can render ok on one spread but not on the other 24 spreads when they're built from exactly the same master and styles

I don’t get it either. It also strikes me as odd that the bold and italic styles are CID-keyed TrueType but the others are PostScript Type 1.

[Quenda Designs]

I have exactly the same problem I am using Avenir font. The heavy and light looks fine, but Avenir book pdfs just like yours and need to get this job approved by my client and off to print, so I feel your pain. We need to sort this problem fast, or I'll have to stick with InDesign.

[DHM]

We're not the only ones. I've found that exporting text to curves seems to make the text render OK. Initially I thought there were problems when viewing in Acrobat but I think it's the shitty render engine. If I import the PDF into Photoshop, the text as curves looks OK. I mean, it's really not a fix but it's probably what I'm going to have to do to get through this project.

[Alfred]

2 minutes ago, Arun Sarkar said:

I got such effect with Helvetica font in DrawPlus, PagePlus & Affinity.

Do you mean you get a mixture of TrueType and PostScript, depending on the font style?

[Alfred]

2 minutes ago, Arun Sarkar said:

No only TrueType.

Thanks for the clarification, Arun. @DHM’s screenshot of the Document Properties dialog suggests that something else is happening with the Montserrat typeface, but I suppose that’s really a side issue: the main point is that the same font shouldn’t look OK on one page but garbled on another.

[DHM]

To clarify, all the fonts and weights and styles look fine in the Publisher project doc. They also look OK if I export text as curves. So it's clearly something to do with the process of PDF export.

Interestingly though, I just tried a PDF export of some of the face variants from Photoshop and there's the same issue with the MEDIUM face of Montserrat. So this is weirder than I thought. I've done a complete uninstall and reinstall of the font downloading anew from Google a couple of times during all this and on one occassion it was ok for the entire Publisher doc export as PDF with actual text but on all the others it hasn't. And after that first time that it worked ok, all I did was come back to the file the following day, having rebooted the PC, did a bit more work on it and re-exported to test, and it all went garbled again.

So now I have even less of a clue what the problem is. Something to do with the actual font? At the moment I just wish this wasn't the chosen brand font for this project!

[EWGU]

Wow! I just experienced a messed up text display for my document, as it was the first time, even after using Affinity Publisher. I did a double take for sure.

After reading this. The only thing I did was exporting in advance export selected text to curves and whew....it worked. I hope that helps. I don't have a url to post before/ after pictures.

 

 

[Yaco]

Has anyone had luck with this issue? Publisher is great to work with but this exporting issue is definitely a pain-point.

[Colin Whyles]

It surprises me to find that this bug is so old. I have just come across it. With me, it affects the Euphemia UCAS Regular font. Euphemia UCAS Italic and Bold export to PDF correctly. The export is set to embed fonts. Exporting text as curves is fine.

However, the peculiar thing is that if I open the document in Designer and export it in exactly the same way then the PDF is fine. There is clearly an oddity in Publisher.

I have used Publisher on 32-page magazines with no problem, although Euphemia is not a font that would be used.

I also use Publisher to produce newsletters of a few pages to be published on the web. Producing readable PDFs for that has been a trick. Embedding fonts doesn't seem to produce readable fonts for Windows users if I use Palatino, for example. We have to flatten the PDFs at 144dpi. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, this produces grey patches around the text and I have to make the background white.

There are clearly problems in exporting PDFs.

Crabbe_leaflet_A5_p2_bug_report.afpub Crabbe leaflet A5 p2 bug report.pdf

[Alfred]

45 minutes ago, Colin Whyles said:

It surprises me to find that this bug is so old. I have just come across it. With me, it affects the Euphemia UCAS Regular font.

It surprises me to find that anyone in Suffolk (or, indeed, anywhere in the UK) needs to use a font that supports Unicode Canadian Aboriginal Syllabic script!

[Colin Whyles]

1 hour ago, Alfred said:

It surprises me to find that anyone in Suffolk (or, indeed, anywhere in the UK) needs to use a font that supports Unicode Canadian Aboriginal Syllabic script!

I'm very fond of Canada. Spent most of 1987 working there. But I admit I didn't know what UCAS stood for.

[Alfred]

21 minutes ago, Colin Whyles said:

But I admit I didn't know what UCAS stood for.

Same here, Colin, but when I decided to investigate I found this:

http://www.tiro.com/syllabics/resources/Euphemia_Charset_2.6.3.pdf

[Colin Whyles]

29 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Same here, Colin, but when I decided to investigate I found this:

http://www.tiro.com/syllabics/resources/Euphemia_Charset_2.6.3.pdf

Thanks, I'll forward that to my colleague, who chose to use it!

[Yaco]

I know, this is like Designer not being able to export vectors reliably.

My workaround is to export a flattened pdf, but then everything gets rasterized which is really not what you want with something like Publisher.

 

 

 

[JayM]

Did anyone find a final solution for this? Having the same problem

[katrinaDTL]

On 1/21/2021 at 7:52 AM, JayM said:

Did anyone find a final solution for this? Having the same problem

I want to know the same thing. I noticed with Montserrat font, that I'm now having this issue after upgrading to version 1.9.1. I created and exported my document using version 1.9.0 and it worked fine. I updated to 1.9.1 and edited the document and now have the garbled text problem.

I've attached screenshots. I did not change this page. I only edited the file to fix embedded image links, because I changed my file/folder structure.

[kenmcd]

The garbled text which looks like that is often the result of having multiple copies of a font installed.

Check the windows fonts folder and directly view the actual files (not Font Manager).
C:\Windows\Fonts

Look for duplicates like:
Montserrat-Regular.ttf
Montserrat-Regular_0.ttf
Montserrat-Regular_1.ttf
etc.

Make sure you only have one version installed.
Un-install the fonts, and then go look to see if anything is still there.
There should be nothing (for those fonts, obviously your other fonts will still be there).
If there are still any versions of those fonts there, you need to delete them as they are duplicates.

Also make sure you have no fonts installed in your user font folder.
C:\Users\USER_NAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Fonts

USER_NAME should be your user name.

The reason to un-install it all, and then clean it all out, is to start clean.
The various font caches need to rebuild properly with only one version of the fonts installed.
Do this with the apps closed so they will re-initialize the app font cache when they re-start.

 

If this does not work for you, please attach your document so we can test it directly.

 

[katrinaDTL]

Thanks @LibreTraining. I'll definitely give this a try and report my results.

[katrinaDTL]

@LibreTraining THANK YOU! It worked like a charm.😁

[Redpost]

I just wanted to pop on and say 'thank you'. I was in the process of sending a 24 page pdf to a client and all the bold of FS Albert font was absolute gobbledygook. I am am on a Mac. I cleared the duplicates as suggested and this solved my immediate problem. I noticed however that I had also duplicate versions of FS Albert Light and this wasn't affecting the typography. For the record the bold that was affected was black on a tint background