Suggestion to add an attachment facility to PDF support

[William Overington]

My understanding is that the PDF specification allows an attachment to be included in a PDF file.

Adobe Reader allows one to extract the attachment(s) from a PDF file that contains one or more attachments. 

Could Affinity Publisher please have the facility to include an attachment in a PDF file when it is produced?

I have a reason for this request.

I read recently that (some? many? all?) desktop publisher programs will not allow the editing of a PDF using a font embedded in the PDF unless the font is also installed on the computer.

I appreciate that that is to protect the intellectual property rights of font producers and I do not object to that at all and I hope that nobody purports that this request is to circumvent that protection of intellectual property rights.

However, if the producer of the font is the also author of the PDF document and the font is for a specialist purpose, it would be helpful to be able to include the font as an attachment to the PDF as well as it being embedded in the PDF and that would be entirely lawful.

I appreciate that if the PDF is made available from a website then the font could also be made available from the same website.

Yet when sending items to the British Library for legal deposit, the PDF can be included in the catalogue but, as I understand it, the font cannot. So having the font embedded in the PDF would greatly help in archiving for the future.

I note however that the British Library does accept fonts for legal deposit as long as they are published. I have deposited various fonts for legal deposit at the British Library and it is likely that I was the first person to do.

I appreciate that including this facility will take work, yet I do not how much work. So it is a partly a matter of how long it would take to include and how difficult a task it would be to do it

William

 

[William Overington]

Could Serif consider this please?

William

 

[Joachim_L]

Does it make sense and how could this be programmed? Let us say Serif can import PDF with attached fonts (right now attached fonts (attachments) will be simply ignored). The attached fonts have to be installed manually anyway on your system or should Affinity read the attached fonts and install them?

As long as the fonts are embedded inside the PDF, this should be enough for archiving (not for editing). And who grants, that font formats like ttf, otf, type1 are made for eternity? Maybe one day noone can install the "ancient" fonts.

And maybe I am not getting your point here?

[William Overington]

Hi

Thank you for replying.

7 hours ago, Joachim_L said:

Does it make sense and how could this be programmed? Let us say Serif can import PDF with attached fonts (right now attached fonts (attachments) will be simply ignored). The attached fonts have to be installed manually anyway on your system or should Affinity read the attached fonts and install them?

A Serif application would not need to import any attachment that is attached to a PDF. The attachment could be extracted from Adobe Reader. A font extracted, as a file, from Adobe Reader, could be installed manually if so desired.

Affinity would not need to read the attached fonts nor install them. I had not thought of that possibility, though I suppose that that would be good, particularly if the end user had the choice of temporary or permanent installation.

8 hours ago, Joachim_L said:

As long as the fonts are embedded inside the PDF, this should be enough for archiving (not for editing).

Yes, that should be enough for archiving.

8 hours ago, Joachim_L said:

 And who grants, that font formats like ttf, otf, type1 are made for eternity? Maybe one day noone can install the "ancient" fonts.

Well, that is a good point.

William