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If I understand correctly, the watermark is still the same pixel size, but because the image is smaller/cropped, the watermark looks bigger? You need to resize it so that it is relatively the same size as the smaller image. Alternatively, you have to resample the image to the same pixel size after cropping - then the watermark will still be the same size.

I wondered about that, although I thought it might should just be a slider that only allowed snapping to 3 settings.

I can confirm the Cursive variable does not work on Win11 for Recursive. By the way I wonder why Affinity allows input between 0 and 1 since the user should only be able to access either 0 or 0.5 (stands for 'auto') or 1 for this specific font, as shown on its demo website (https://www.recursive.design/) :

OK, I see that but I would not considering that to mean there are 13 axes "advertised" in the sense of being exposed to direct manipulation in every app that supports variable fonts.

Maybe you aren't aware of Star Citizen. Also, one could say people are perfect when they are born, but become less perfect as they develop and learn about new things they can inevitably screw up.

Oops... The number of axes is displayed when searching for a font anyway

Thanks but I get a nearly empty window for that URL on my Mac in Safari. Except for a few tiny icons that do not seem to have anything to do with any particular font, this is what I see: I just noticed that the URL immediately redirects to https://fonts.google.com for me. No idea why.

Wait I thought you said earlier the feature is at an alpha stage of development, unworthy of being tested by complex professional experts such as yourself.... I'm feeling a BitConfused....

As ‘promoted’ and available to experiment with on Google Fonts and other variable font Apps, only five of the variables are made available by the font designer as per @Ash’s notes at the start of this thread…

@StuartRc, are you still not seeing all the sliders in some of the fonts that others like myself are seeing? If so, any idea why? Could it be related to the OS version? Also, can a few Windows users confirm seeing the same bug with the Cursive slider for Geologica or Recursive in Win10 & Win11?

Here: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Roboto+Flex/tester

I'm probably missing something obvious but where do you see 13 variables (same as axes?) advertised?

it's the missing feature that we can adopt this tool for the entire office here, we depend heavily on measuring tool. What i do not understand is, if we can measure, why it does not keep in the drawings? seems that is just a simple step, is not something that will be created from ground zero.

A jet engine may have axes throttle cooling intensity direction vector air volume reverse thrust … etc The pilot, however would want only throttle, direction and reverse thrust, right? They wouldn't want to make the pilot remember to adjust the cooling and air volume controls, and neither would they want the pilot able to tweak them in a way, that may damage the engine. It's the same with these additional hidden axes in a font: When font size is increased on a serif font, the stroke width - to - size - relation axis may need to be adjusted for optically pleasing typography — however, also the size of the serifs needs to be adjusted in unison, so there is another axis changing with size. Instead of making the user tweak everything manually, the font designer may expose only one additional axis called "optical adjustment", that then influences how the other two react to font size. A font is a product and thus has to meet expectations, here: aesthetics. A finely tuned orchestration of all axes is what makes a font great, and that's what is important to font users at the axis interface level. De-tuning a font may be interesting for artistic purposes, but I think we can agree, that that's advanced use. Showing all axes by standard would be overwhelming and a disservice to the user. Maybe an option to switch on hidden axes can be provided — but remember: as soon as you'd adjust the official axes, the setting of all associated hidden axes would get recalculated and thus reset, anyway.

Again, the option is used in the font, but only under control of the font designer, automatically, not under direct control of the user.

I have provided plenty of feedback on features in this forum; the root cause of far too many of the issues is, unfortunately, the process behind it, and therefore it's beyond pointless for customers to provide input at a hopelessly late stage. Just like Boeing's customers. It's completely valid criticism. Using the term 'troll' in the context of my posts is also groundbreaking unserious, but classic internet.

My font of choice is Roboto Flex and for my design, the only variable attributes I wish to include are 'ascender height' and 'descender depth' which both look very reasonable when used sensibly, by no means ugly (at least for my design) but the font designer, despite having taken the time to include these options doesn't make these variations available (despite other fonts/font designers doing so)... If the 'danger' is that the font designer doesn't want a user choosing an ugly combination and then telling people they used "font x" which has the font designer's name on it, why would they even create that as an option in the first place?

It's hardly a "leak" when the beta is publicly available to anyone who has a V2 licence (To me, "leak" implies that something was secret.)

They do see the light of day, but only automatically, not under your manual control. Maybe the font designer knows which combinations of settings will look reasonable. And maybe they don't want a user choosing an ugly combination and then telling people they used "font x" which has the font designer's name on it, to produce ugly work that the font designer doesn't want their name associated with.

Use these settings during Export from an Affinity application: (with a password specified, of course, in the Permissions password field) That will result in a PDF with these settings, that anyone can Open in Acrobat Reader without a password (but will not be able to Open or Place in Affinity applications without one.) Here's a sample, with password = password password3.pdf

That I understand, but why develop a jet engine but only present a carrier pigeon, the font designer promotes all the 'possibilities of the font's various axes but then decides eight of those are not worth including... My question would be... I think many a designer would love access to some of the other unique variables the font offers so why is the font designer spending time developing the other variables if they're never going to see the light of day? That happens but only under certain circumstances, so why not make all axes available so the designer can experiment?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ89-d6bhvA

That is a good question. maybe the variable options are non standard. or bespoke from a developer. Depends on which ones are priority. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXxI0fLtQyE&t=4s

If it crashes just while drag selecting text then I would try turning hardware acceleration off. If that solves the problem, then you'd have to look into whether you need to update your drivers before turning it back on.

Ash wrote this in the first post: "Why would a designer do this? Well, a variable font might adjust an axis internally based on your choices for other axes that you can directly adjust. For example, observe how counter widths change when the weight axis is adjusted in the animation above."