Fonts not honoured when Importing PDF

[Nazario]

I have an issue where the embedded fonts in a PDF are not being being honoured when I import a PDF into Publisher.

 

It should look like this (ignore the Quicklook info around the edge)...

 

However it looks like this...

 

Here is the font information from Acrobat. This seems to happen on any font not using Ansi Encoding and is not limited to the sample above.

[walt.farrell]

As discussed frequently in these forums, Affinity does not support using the embedded fonts when you Open or Place a PDF. You must have the fonts installed locally on your machine.

[Nazario]

30 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

As discussed frequently in these forums, Affinity does not support using the embedded fonts when you Open or Place a PDF. You must have the fonts installed locally on your machine.

Thanks Walt. Why is that then?

[walt.farrell]

11 minutes ago, Nazario said:

Thanks Walt. Why is that then?

Just because, as far as I can tell. PDF files are always brought in as editable, and Affinity uses the local fonts.

There have been many requests to improve that.

[Nazario]

Another daft decision. That renders pretty much all client supplied artwork as useless then. I guess Publisher is also not ready for a professional environment either. 

All this is going to do is cause everyone massive headaches fixing artwork and increasing usage of unlicensed fonts which will harm the many talented type designers out there when their fonts are illegally copied and sent on to Affinity Publisher users.

Massive step backwards. Reminds me of my formative QuarkXpress days where we had to collect for output and include all fonts links etc; 20 years ago!

What happens when you export as PDF from Affinity suite? Does it also wrap up the fonts used alongside it? My guess is not. Not that you would need to do that for any other app and if you're sending to another Publisher user you may as well send the whole Publisher document with fonts included as well.

PDF was created to be not editable so you could pretty much guarantee the layout will appear as it should cross platform. All the so called PDF editors these days are crippled bits of software offering only very limited editing capabilities. Even Acrobat Pro or whatever it’s called these days is limited in editing it’s very own PDFs. 

Artwork should be amended at source and then exported to PDF to retain quality and integrity of original artwork. Making them editable again opens up a can of worms with regards to alignments, font issues and all manner of problems. 

There needs to be a tick box in Publisher to import PDF as ‘non editable’ whereby it retains all its properties and uses the embedded fonts. 

[mac_heibu]

Yes, we all know this issue. There are dozens of threads about this. And yes we know the user complaints about this drawback too. It is not necessary to repeat this over and over again.

[Nazario]

I didn’t know the issue. I searched and nothing came up so apologies for another thread on it but it is still a valid issue. 

[walt.farrell]

27 minutes ago, Nazario said:

What happens when you export as PDF from Affinity suite? Does it also wrap up the fonts used alongside it? My guess is not. 

Yes, if you provide the appropriate options during export.

 

28 minutes ago, Nazario said:

Reminds me of my formative QuarkXpress days where we had to collect for output and include all fonts links etc; 15 years ago!

Note that this is still "formative days" for Publisher, with various functions missing or needing improvement.

Though in the area of importing PDFs, the Affinity products Designer and Photo have supported that for several years now, with the same limitation.

[garrettm30]

40 minutes ago, mac_heibu said:

It is not necessary to repeat this over and over again.

It's true that we who frequent the forums are getting familiar with this limitation, but for many users it will come as a surprise. I do expect to keep seeing similar reports until Serif is finally able to enable PDF font passthrough, which if I am not mistaken, I seem to remember their saying that they do hope to address this some time in the future.

[walt.farrell]

17 minutes ago, garrettm30 said:

It's true that we who frequent the forums are getting familiar with this limitation, but for many users it will come as a surprise.

Right. And even if one tries to search the forum, PDF is too general. Even searching for both PDF and font may be too general.

Will they guess that the right term is PDF and font and passthrough? Probably not.

[wonderings]

this has been an issue since the beta and most likely since the first beta release. 

They simply need to offer a way to place the PDF without trying to make it editable. Place it as a linked file, nothing embedded. Like others I cannot even use this Publisher for any live jobs till this is fixed as many jobs have placed PDF ads or even a designed file from the customer that needs to be tweaked size wise or add bleeds. 

[Nazario]

On 7/29/2019 at 8:05 PM, wonderings said:

this has been an issue since the beta and most likely since the first beta release. 

They simply need to offer a way to place the PDF without trying to make it editable. Place it as a linked file, nothing embedded. Like others I cannot even use this Publisher for any live jobs till this is fixed as many jobs have placed PDF ads or even a designed file from the customer that needs to be tweaked size wise or add bleeds. 

I keep trying to migrate to Affinity but I'm met with not insignificant obstacles at each step. There's a big issue with Image resizing in Affinity Photo which we seem to be finally getting a fix for very soon which stopped me from using Photo since it was released and now Ive turned my attention to Publisher I've hit upon this issue at the very first step of recreating one of my publications in Publisher. I've created my template documents and gone to import the very first client provided artwork and hit upon this issue. Until it's resolved I still can't migrate to Affinity.

I appreciate as Walt said, its still early days. All three apps are brilliant but there are quite a few big issues to be ironed out until they be can used in a professional environment.

Yes for this particular issue you could export the PDF as a TIFF but you will lose quality when it comes to printing small type and I refuse to provide my clients with sub par work.

Without the ability to import 3rd party clients work (adverts etc) I still can't use Publisher in a  publishing environment.

[AlanPickup]

Do not know if this is what  you are trying to achieve but I have had to put PDF documents often with custom fonts in to newsletters, often having to reduce the size from A4 to A5. I have found that if you print the PDF in Microsoft print to PDF you can place the outcome  in to publisher as an un-editable PDF without any changes to font styles.

[wonderings]

9 minutes ago, AlanPickup said:

Do not know if this is what  you are trying to achieve but I have had to put PDF documents often with custom fonts in to newsletters, often having to reduce the size from A4 to A5. I have found that if you print the PDF in Microsoft print to PDF you can place the outcome  in to publisher as an un-editable PDF without any changes to font styles.

You could go through and outline all the fonts in Acrobat and I am guessing things would be fine. Needing to do extra steps just to use a PDF is not something has me clambering to try and make it work. I know I could if I needed too but I am not interested in fighting or figuring work arounds for something that is just simple in Indesign. 

[Alfred]

4 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

As discussed frequently in these forums, Affinity does not support using the embedded fonts when you Open or Place a PDF. You must have the fonts installed locally on your machine.

 

3 hours ago, Nazario said:

Thanks Walt. Why is that then?

 

3 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Just because, as far as I can tell. PDF files are always brought in as editable, and Affinity uses the local fonts.

There have been many requests to improve that.

The editability isn’t really the issue. The Affinity apps don’t interpret the embedded fonts, which is what they would need to do in order to correctly display fonts which are not installed on the local machine. That same ability to interpret the fonts is crucial to PDF passthrough.

[Nazario]

Seems theres a bug in Acrobat that stops the fonts from being outlined. *rolleyes*

It very rarely works for me. Most instances the screen just flickers when you hit 'apply' and nothing actually happens.

I give up.