Corel X8 still fills some letters when importing curved PDFs (even from CS2 - see example)

As per title Corel Draw X8 still have the issue that I would really would like to have fixed as we are large format printers and we have to open many customers files and often the issue is small in just some of small letters and hard to spot resulting in mistakes and reprints.

I am surprised as many other comatibility issues were sorted and I can open more files correctly but this particular issue I guess was not noticed.

Below is just today's example I had, with some of the circular elements broken apart I guess in a wrong way:

Original PDF file:

http://www.inbury.co.uk/export_problem.pdf

  • Yes, it's a very annoying problem. You could solve selecting the internal shape with the Shape toold and chooseing "invert direction", but if it happens several times, it requires a lot of time and if you didn't notice it it could be a big problem.
    btw you can solve it by several ways, saving as Postscript with Acrobat or saving as PDF X/4 with Illustrator
    https://we.tl/MZJ07TYuZl
  • It may be that they are already curves in the PDF, I've noticed that exporting CDR files that are native curves to EPS and selecting curves can do the same thing to some fonts. Try importing but selecting text instead and look at that area again. May not help if the other text is text and you need curves but may give a clue to what's happening.

  • Absolutely agree. But I would also like to add that the absolute worse PDFs to open in a non-Adobe application are those from ID, followed by AI. As a note, AI opened the PDF without issue as long as I loaded my Futura fonts and then, of course as mine are Adobe fonts and not the Bitstream version used in the PDF, I had to swap in the Adobe Futura.

    You do have Acrobat, correct? If so, you can create a custom Flattener preset that will convert all text to curves, fix outline issues, etc.

    These settings:

    Produce this result:

    As you notice above, I first reset the page boxes. The Flattener will only convert to curves what is on the displayable "page." So in this case, I needed to first reset the page boxes, then run the Flattener.

    If you want me to upload the PDF, I would be happy to do so. Also, this is not a panacea for every single PDF one runs across. But I would say the settings above handle so many of the cases I run into that it is hard to remember the last time there was an issue with the result.

    Also, some applications handle certain PDFs better than other applications. For reticent PDFs, I sometimes try other applications really quickly. For instance, XDP opened this PDF just fine. Sometimes not so much. But with the Acrobat Flattener settings above, it is rarely needed to try them.