Characters missing after saving presentation as a PDF using Aspose.Slides for .NET

I’ve attached a zip file with four documents (I think - I’m not sure it succeeded? I don’t see a tag for the file…) - one presentation and three PDF files. The presentation is the original document, and the PDFs are documents created by opening the documents using Aspose.Slides and immediately saving.

The PDF file created using Aspose.Slides 17.12.1.0 (indicated by it’s title) is the version that caused our client to alert us to the problem. You can see that several characters in the middle part of the slide in that presentation have been rendered as missing characters (boxes). We had the save options “EmbedFullFonts” and “EmbedTrueTypeFontsForASCII” turned on for this save. The non-rendered characters are the problem.

Before reporting this to you to see if a newer version would help (it’s been a little while since we updated), I tried it using the latest version (18.5.0.0) using the same options. It got worse. You can see the result in the PDF file with the title that indicates it’s from 18.5.0.0 with fonts embedded - all of the characters even close to the ones that were a problem are now missing, and there are other characters in their place.

It’s also huge - either it wasn’t actually embedding the fonts before, or it’s doing something very different now, as it went from ~200 KB to ~40 MB. I tried it again, turning off the options to embed the fonts, and it went down to a reasonable size again, and the font issue actually got better than with the embedded fonts, but it’s still not right - it’s just like the 17.12.1.0 results, except the characters are now rendered as blanks, not boxes.

Is there anything I can do to get the characters to render correctly when saving this presentation as a PDF using Aspose.Slides?

Thanks,
Michael Whalen

@mwhalen,

I have observed your comments. I am unable to observe any file attached to this thread. Can you please check and make sure you attached file properly so that we may help you out. Before sharing files again can you please try to use Aspose.Slides latest version 18.5 on your end and share feedback with us if there is still an issue.

The file must not have attached because it was so big - it wouldn’t compress the 40 MB pdf very much. Here’s the same zip with that file removed.

Sample.zip (684.6 KB)

Also, if you’ll read my question, you’ll see that I have tried the latest version. I’m comparing it to an earlier version which actually appears to work better - it doesn’t generate 40 MB pdf files from 400 KB sources, and messes up the text less. But I’m not sure the earlier version was actually embedding the fonts, or if that was a bug, so I was asking if there’s some reason for the massive difference in final sizes - it grew two thousand times bigger by updating to the latest Aspose.Slides, which is concerning.

Thanks,
Michael Whalen

And - just to follow up - most importantly I’m asking if there’s something I can do to avoid having the text messed up, or if that’s a bug you’ll have to fix.

Thanks again,
Michael Whalen

@mwhalen,

I have observed your comments. A ticket with ID SLIDESNET-40218 has been created in our issue tracking system to investigate and resolve the issue. This thread has been associated with the ticket so that we may share the notification with you once issue will be fixed.

Hi - is it possible to get an update for this issue, by any chance?

Thanks,
Michael Whalen

@mwhalen,

I have verified from our issue tracking system and regret to share that at present the issue is still unresolved. We request for your patience till the time the issue gets resolved and we will share feedback with you.

The issues you have found earlier (filed as SLIDESNET-40218) have been fixed in this update.