Q: Has anyone ever exported a Keynote to a PDF and noticed that some characters were missing?

Same for me. This is *really* annoying...

I think we should let apple know about this bug: http://www.apple.com/feedback/keynote.html

Right, still doesn't work.

The update to keynote didn't change anything.

Characters still disappear in my tables.

I have not seen any response from Apple on this. I did write them directly about a month ago - including instructions how to reproduce the problem, but I didn't hear back yet.

This is a big deal for me, and I'd even say the main part of the science community that rely on Keynote to present result. The fact that the Keynote 6 "randomly" removes text from the final result tables makes resutls in situations like Bill Gates' "Blue screen of death during presentation", but this time it's Apple that screws up, not Windows..

To be honest Apple did write me asking information and the presentation needed to reproduce the problem a few weeks back. I sent everything they requested but didn't hear anything sice.

I was hoping this update had the fix but apparently not.

Apple will ask end users to send them sample files so they investigate specifis issues, they never enter into discussion or provide any information directly to users.

Exporting to images and bundling everything in a pdf seems to be the only workaround.

If you have a bit of familiarity with the terminal, you can easily automate this with a shell script, using ImageMagik and ghostscript (no need to reimport every single image in keynote). I think one needs to install ImageMagik and gs via mac ports or similar.

First of all, you need to convert all images to pdf, then you use ghostrscript to merge them in a single file.

Here's my script. It's a bit rudimental and it assumes png figures. Use it at your own risk! Maybe somebody can make an automator procedure out of it?

---

directory=$1

filename=`basename $directory`.pdf

cd $directory

for i in  *.png

do

    convert $i ${i/png/pdf}

done

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE \

    -dAutoFilterColorImages=false \

    -dAutoFilterGrayImages=false \

    -dColorImageFilter=/FlateEncode \

    -dGrayImageFilter=/FlateEncode \

    -dJPEGQ=100 -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=$filename `ls *.pdf`

mv ${filename} ..

echo "Created $filename"

cd ..

---

Hope it helps.

I did a bit of extra googling.

There's actually a simpler way, using automator.

I found a nice tutorial here: http://miriamposner.com/blog/use-automator-to-combine-your-research-photos-into- one-pdf/

You can complicate it a bit so that you can also set the filename: https://discussions.apple.com/message/16586897#16586897

Hi Gustavo_C,

I have exactly the same problem as you with the exactly same font!! (Antenna).

First, I have noticed that it only occurs with this font, so, maybe it's a problem of the font and not a Keynote problem. Is your version of Antenna original (bought) or you found it over the internet? Is it a TTF font file or an OTF font file?

Then, I am also using the Export to jpeg trick, but you don't need to reimport the jpegs to keynote again! Just open Acrobat and do Combine files to a single PDF. Select the jpegs exported from keynote (all at same time, to maintain the order) and....there you go!!

If you have any update on the export Antenna problem, please let me know!

It has been more than 6 months, and this bug in Keynote is still not solved.

I had an embarrassing incident again today, when i circulated slides in pdf format that were corrupted - random characters missing due to the bug.

Can we get an answer from anyone on the Keynote team when this will get fixed?

I'm using Keynote 6.2 and I consistently have problems with this and have to rework what I put in my presentations in hopes that the exporter won't drop the new characters.

This has been an obvious problem for some time and Apple hasn't fixed it.  I'm not sure what it will take to get this fixed, but it's very frustrating when the thing reducing your efficiency is bad software.

I've had numerous font glitches with Keynote 6, including the failure to encode professional type characters to PDF in some typefaces.

(We use DIN commercially and the en-dash consistently fails to render to PDF when followed by a number.)

We also find that in some typefaces the auto page numbers are covered with a "D" character.

This is true whether we use a professional font manager or FontBook for font installation.

The typeface files have been run through FontDoctor for any corruption and are clean. They work perfectly in other applications. Keynote is the problem.

If, as you say, Gill Sans is causing a conflict (I'll check this out), then that's doubly a problem, since Apple inexplicably removed the ability to globally replace fonts in the font-warning panel that shows when you open a document (another hour long talk with a helpful but powerless level 2 tech at Apple).

Still having this issue in Keynote 6.6.1 on 10.10.5, whether exporting to pdf or printing to pdf.

Copying the text into a text editor and then back into the file seems to make it go away. It always seems to be a "from this spot to the end of the line of text" type of vanishing...

Changing the font does not help.

I also turned on show hidden characters on the text in BBEdit and there was no funny character to blame.