benwiggy Posted August 14, 2019 Share Posted August 14, 2019 The .458 Release Notes say "PDF Import: Improved Font Substitution suggestions when opening PDFs etc". Build .420 also claimed fixes to PDF Import. What changes have been made? A few quick tests shows Publisher still cannot usefully import PDFs containing font data at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joachim_L Posted August 14, 2019 Share Posted August 14, 2019 18 minutes ago, benwiggy said: PDF Import: Improved Font Substitution suggestions when opening PDFs etc They talked about substitution, not about editing text formatted with embedded fonts. Just personally speaking about Illustrator CS 6. If I open an "external" PDF in Illustrator with fonts I have not installed, Illustrator warns me and I have the opportunity to replace the missing fonts. In the end it is a legal matter, not all fonts are for free and the companies selling fonts won't be too enthusiastic, if their fonts will be available on people's PC who did not pay for the fonts. What we do need is passing through PDF without the possiblilty to edit them. If you still need these fonts, there are command line tools for extracting embedded fonts and if you are lucky, then the complete font is embedded and not just a part of it. mac_heibu and Nazario 2 ------ Windows 10 | i5-8500 CPU | Intel UHD 630 Graphics | 32 GB RAM | Latest Retail and Beta versions of complete Affinity range installed Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
benwiggy Posted August 14, 2019 Author Share Posted August 14, 2019 I'm not asking to illegally extract fonts for my own use! Currently, Affinity does not even display PDFs correctly when I DO have the fonts installed. Yes, we need pass-through PDF for placing PDFs in Publisher: but we also need accurate Rasterisation to bitmap in Photo; and accurate vector editing in Designer (either with system fonts, replacements, or outlines). These things work perfectly in plenty of other apps, but not in Affinity. Aman 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joachim_L Posted August 14, 2019 Share Posted August 14, 2019 1 minute ago, benwiggy said: Currently, Affinity does not even display PDFs correctly when I DO have the fonts installed. Accepted. But ... PDF was never meant to be an exchange format for editing, otherwise Adobe would have called it PDEF. Years ago I was happy that there was Pitstop, so a little editing was possible. So what Serif has made so far, is very close to the layout displayed in a PDF reader. What is lacking right now is - previously mentioned a pass through - or the ability to open e.g. .idml for opening layouts. ------ Windows 10 | i5-8500 CPU | Intel UHD 630 Graphics | 32 GB RAM | Latest Retail and Beta versions of complete Affinity range installed Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
benwiggy Posted August 14, 2019 Author Share Posted August 14, 2019 44 minutes ago, Joachim_L said: Accepted. But ... PDF was never meant to be an exchange format for editing, otherwise Adobe would have called it PDEF. Years ago I was happy that there was Pitstop, so a little editing was possible. So what Serif has made so far, is very close to the layout displayed in a PDF reader. What is lacking right now is - previously mentioned a pass through - or the ability to open e.g. .idml for opening layouts. Editing a PDF is not an unreasonable expectation. Adobe's Illustrator can open, edit and save to the PDF format natively. PDF is essentially tokenised PostScript. There's nothing magic that prevents its use as an editable file format. Very close? No. Pass-through is missing in Publisher, but all three apps make the same errors when importing PDFs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joachim_L Posted August 14, 2019 Share Posted August 14, 2019 16 minutes ago, benwiggy said: There's nothing magic that prevents its use as an editable file format. So our experiences differ and we do not come to an agreement. I have PDF files here which are faster, better and easier to edit with Publisher than in Illustrator. And these files are originally made with Indesign and not with obscure software which produces somehow a PDF. 29 minutes ago, benwiggy said: but all three apps make the same errors when importing PDFs Because they all use the same PDF library. ------ Windows 10 | i5-8500 CPU | Intel UHD 630 Graphics | 32 GB RAM | Latest Retail and Beta versions of complete Affinity range installed Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IllusionStudio Posted August 30, 2019 Share Posted August 30, 2019 On 8/14/2019 at 9:08 AM, Joachim_L said: What we do need is passing through PDF without the possiblilty to edit them... This is the solution to finally use Publisher as a real alternative to Indesign or Quark Xpress. I produce a magazine with many ads included. I is impossible (not to mention illegal) to install all fonts that is included in the PDFs of our ad-clients to get a correct view of their content. Unfortunately, I couldn´t do a complete program change in the past, because Publisher won´t support this feature. Nazario and Catshill 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davemacdo Posted September 8, 2019 Share Posted September 8, 2019 Just wanted to chime in here with @benwiggy that I continue to have the same problems with Affinity on imported PDFs. (In fact, I'm guessing from the same source applications.) I am usually simply trying to rearrange elements on the page, or hide certain elements from being printed. I'm not actually even editing the text, but just opening the file destroys anything that uses a ligature. Like Ben, I am forced to do this kind of work in Illustrator at present, but I would much rather do it in Publisher, and it doesn't seem to be an unusual request to open a file that has embedded characters correctly, especially when I do have the fonts installed on my computer. benwiggy 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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