Have a customer who is opening PDFs in Illustrator and noticing their text is being rendered into images. Are there certain font types that do this (and don't do this), and / or is there a way to force fonts to render as text / curves in the PDF?

Thanks!

Alex
DocRaptor Support

Text should always remain as text unless it's being filtered, do you know if the customer is applying any SVG or CSS filters?

Their CSS appears to be very minimal, and my own unfamiliarity with this particular issue means I can't make a definite judgment call on whether or not the text should be rendered as images or not. ex: Does any CSS force rasterization, or only some (or even most) CSS properties?

I have asked the customer for the an isolated use case to verify and investigate. They have provided a single page document that they say is rendering almost all of the text as images when we process the document with Prince 11.

Per the customer: "The only bit which is rendered as text in illustrator is header and sub headers. The intro text (below headline) and the body are conveyed to images"

Are you able to look at the attached Example.html and provide any feedback or guidance which we can provide back to the customer? I realize the answer may simply be that in order to support certain styles or layout options, the text will need to be rendered as images, but I would like for us to be sure.

Alex,
DocRaptor Support

1. Example.html‎ 28.1 kB

Edited 4 Oct 2018 by apritchardEB

Just made a PDF of that doc and opened in Illustrator. Got a message that some of the fonts would be converted to outlines because the fonts weren't available to Illustrator. I bet that's what's happening...

Thanks for your replies and looking into this... Really appreciate it...

Any thoughts on their response? They seem to believe they have the correct fonts: "This is the actual print screen we get. We have the necessary fonts installed but the only bit which we can edit (excluding the headline Export credit…) is % everything else is recognised as an image"

Alex
DocRaptor Support

1. 85F85F57-EA94-493E-92AB-54ABBE349570.png‎ 770.4 kB

If they want to edit the text in the PDF, they need to disable font subsetting, to ensure that the complete font is available.

mikeday, looks like disabling font-subsetting solved 99% of their problems. Thanks a ton for looking into this.

They have a very small portion of text that is still not be editable. I think you've done enough to help us, but if you do have an idea on why this would be, I'd be happy to hear it.

I can't think of why there would be an inline portion of text not editable like that unless they've applied some CSS to just that portion. As far as I can tell, however, that isn't the case.

The HTML for that specific portion is: <h5 class="subtitle">The reintroduction of US sanctions on Iran has got export financiers questioning the extent of their export credit agencies’ support. What is covered and what is not? The answers are inconsistent and vague.</h5>

I would expect if some of the text was editable within that <h5> element, all of it would be. Any thoughts? Attached is what they see when opening the PDF in Illustrator with font subsetting disabled.

Alex,
DocRaptor Support

1. AF232F05-F942-414F-9A10-3E282F9D7240.png‎ 328.3 kB

The CSS on that element:

.article-cont h5.subtitle {
    text-transform: initial;
    font-style: normal;
    font-family: "Calibri" !important;
    font-size: 14pt;
    margin-bottom: 0.5cm;
}

The actual HTML element:

<h5 class="subtitle">The reintroduction of US sanctions on Iran has got export financiers questioning the extent of their export credit agencies’ support. What is covered and what is not? The answers are inconsistent and vague.</h5>

So me this seems pretty cut and dry so seeing that text in the middle rasterized is a little odd.

That's really strange, does it still do it if that's the only text in the document?

Thanks again for the follow-up. They claim yes. I have attached an isolated case here according to the user, with a resultant PDF, a screen shot of opening it in Illustrator, and the source HTML (which is unfortunately still a bit large but very minimal in terms of content).

Alex
DocRaptor Support

1. isolatedcase.html‎ 12.9 kB
2. isolatedcase.pdf‎ 1.2 MB
3. isolatedcase.png‎ 319.6 kB

Very strange. It could be worth trying Prince 12 to see if the adjustments we made to CFF font embedding have any effect; unfortunately Adobe are not very helpful on this matter as they are only willing to discuss loading PDF files that were created in Illustrator, not by other programs.

Thanks for the info. Really appreciate you helping us look into this. We've followed up with our customer with the info provided.

Cheers!

Alex
DocRaptor Support

It may also be worth running the document through Prince without the DocRaptor TEST DOCUMENT toolbar thing, just to see if that partial overlap is contributing to the issue.