Spacing issue when importing from Illustrator to Animate

[chinery]

I'm having an issue where copy/paste or import from an Illustrator file works fine in one condition but not another. I'm a complete beginner to Animate so if I'm doing something fundamentally wrong I'd be very happy to hear alternatives.

I want to get mathematical equations into Animate. I have tried using MathMagic and MathType to typeset the equations. Copying and pasting directly (as a PDF) does not work at all, Animate says the file type is not recognised. However I am able to paste into Illustrator fine. Then if I copy from Illustrator and paste in Animate, the text appears.

This works fine when I use MathType. However, when I use MathMagic, the spacing is wrong in Animate. This is despite the fact that in Illustrator, both equations look fine. Screenshots below:

The equations in Illustrator

Copy/paste or import into Animate

The only thing that jumps out to me is that when I paste the equation from MathType into Illustrator, I get a message saying "To preserve appearance, some text has been outlined.". But both look fine in the Illustrator file.

I'm curious to know what has caused the difference, partly because I might like to use MathMagic but also because I might need to import things from Illustrator often and don't want to run into any surprises like this later. Thanks!

[Colin Holgate]

At the Illustrator stage, can you try selecting the math and do a convert to outlines? Then copy that into Animate.

[chinery]

Converting to outlines does indeed fix the issue. Now that you've said that, I can see that coming from MathType (spacing fine), the minus signs are converted to lines, but stay as text coming from MathMagic (spacing broken in Animate).

Any idea what's causing the text to line up properly in Illustrator but not Animate? I've tried different fonts and get the same issue (although not many). I'd like to keep it as text if possible just in case I need to edit.

[chinery]

I notice that Colin Holgate​'s post was marked as the "answer" a little while ago, but the problem has simply been pushed back one layer. My real question was why the same set of vectors renders differently in Illustrator and Animate, and how can I prevent the problem from happening in future while retaining the editability of the text?

[Colin Holgate]

I seem not to be the correct answer anymore!

Did you log a bug about the problem?:

Feature Request/Bug Report Form

If you do that and you hear from the Animate team to say that it's a known problem, you could come back and report that, and mark your own post as Correct.

[chinery]

Hi Colin, did you see my messages above?

Would you say this is a bug, then? I'm happy to report it as such, just wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing some feature. It certainly seems like spacing should be preserved, but I can imagine there might be some technical differences in how the applications manage fonts, for example. Thanks for the help.

[Colin Holgate]

Well, it's an imperfection. It could be that the font is doing tracking in a standard way, that happens to work in Illustrator but not in Animate. If you use the link I gave you can always word the report differently, like, it would be nice if Animate could handle fonts as well as Illustrator does.

[Myra Ferguson]

Here's an idea you could try--set your text in Illustrator. Create a CC Library for your expressions and drag each one there. Then in Animate, drag it out onto your stage. Select the layer then set whether you want it to be editable text, converted to outlines, or turned into a bitmap (which I wouldn't really recommend) there. The benefit to keeping in your CC Library is that even if you do convert it to outlines, you could go back to it in the CC Library as editable text if you need to make changes.

[Colin Holgate]

You could work close to that way without a CC subscription, just by doing the convert to outlines on a copy of the text in Illustrator. Would still leave the original mystery unsolved.

[chinery]

Thanks both. I'll submit the bug report and play around with Myra's suggestion to see if I can find a workflow that suits me.