Anyone know what these little white shapes are?

[hiviz]

In the smaller text, I'm seeing these little white shapes at the character connection points after exporting to pdf. Don't see this in xdp and the shapes disappear if I scroll in.

Bahnschrift font (Google font)
Xara Designer Pro X 19.0.1
exported to pdf v1.5

[ernie-f]

Hi @hiviz, this is due to the font. The "Bahnschrift" has been created from objects and has not been assembled as a path.
If you set the wireframe view in Xara, you can see that. Here is a screen shot from Xara and from Fontcreator Professional for clarification.



The PDF should be printable, if not or you don't like the view you have two options:
1. take another font
2. Convert the font into objects and connect each letter into one path

[handrawn]

following on from ernie:

I did a quick print - looks ok

also these artifacts do not appear when viewing in affinity designer [beta], so it may be some programs cope with this better than others...

[ernie-f]

Hi @handrawn mein Freund,

nope in Affinity Designer the same as in Xara. Put on the wireframw view and you got this:

[handrawn]

sorry ernie - I did not express myself well

what I really meant was that design programs like xara and affinity do not show the gaps in rendered view, whereas acrobat reader for example does

I accept you can see the font construction in wireframe view, thanks for the explanation

[ernie-f]

Yes handrawn I understand what you mean.
Acrobat Reader and Acorbat Pro has always had problems displaying PDFs correctly.
Other PDF viewers like Sumatra PDF shows the PDF correctly.



For someone who doesn't have to work with printing industry standards like I do, you might not need Acrobat Pro either.

[hiviz]

Thanks ernie-f and handrawn.

It's not a big issue - I can just convert the text to shapes as you suggested - just wondered what was going on there since I hadn't run into this before.

[gwpriester]

Does this happen with all fonts or just this one? It's really weird that a font would not have a solid outline. I guess it's not impossible I just can't imagine why a font designer would want to do that.

[mwenz]

Does this happen with all fonts or just this one? It's really weird that a font would not have a solid outline. I guess it's not impossible I just can't imagine why a font designer would want to do that.

That font is either a variable font (it comes with Windows only as a variable font) or it has had "instances" created form it and the overlaps were never cleaned up.

The overlaps are there in a variable font so that as the font, in an application that supports variable fonts, has the parameters adjusted, the font becomes lighter or heavier, or slanted, etc., which may include each piece being controlled separately stay overlapping.

I suspect Xara product, at least the desktop applications, will never support variable fonts.

[gwpriester]

Thanks Mike.