Posted September 07, 2020 by Jason Tocci
Just uploaded a very minor update to Inner System Blues for a couple tiny wording choices and a correction to the cover so the text looks more like I intended. Just in case I'm not the only one who's been having with exporting to PDF from Affinity Publisher, I figured I'll share what I did.
Here's a before and after of the logo:
It was even more noticeable on the CTRL cover, where the "CTRL" text showed up in faded red when exported to JPG but light orange when exported to PDF. So what happened?
Searching online for this will turn up a bunch of pages that indicate it's a problem with mismatched color profiles with placed images, but mucking with those settings had no effect on PDF exports—it only changed how things looked on screen. Rather, the issue was with vector objects—i.e., text and shapes—that have layer blend modes. (The text is set to "Hard Light" on Inner System Blues, "Color Dodge" on Cosmic Highway, and "Color Burn" on CTRL.)
The only fix I could figure out was to rasterize and merge everything. I still wanted the text to be text, though, so it could be copied from PDFs and the like, so I did the following:
Kind of a pain in the butt! But now you see the same cover I see. Hope you'll agree it looks nicer!