wlb

The so-called "Font traits" are not really "traits". They are actually the names of the active fonts in the Font family. From what I have seen, it is nothing more than that.

That is exactly the point for me. For an extreme example, with the font Avenir, the "Font traits" (= actual font name) for the Avenir "Font family" are: Light, Light Oblique, Book, Book Oblique, Roman, Medium, Medium Oblique, Black, Black Oblique, Heavy, and Heavy Oblique. If I explicitly specify the Avenir Font Family, then "Font traits" is quickly and correctly populated with these font names. But if I select "[No change]" hoping to build a reliable style hierarchy using the actual fonts that I've explicitly activated for the purpose, I'm presented with the following so-called "Font weights": Thin, Extra-Light, Light, Normal, Medium, Semi-bold, Bold, Extra-bold, and Black! No correspondence whatever. Font weights has no relevance for this font. Ok. Oblique probably maps to the Italic checkbox. But how is anyone to know how Publisher maps these weights to the actual fonts? Normal could easily be either Avenir Roman or Medium. Since Avenir Book is lighter than Avenir Roman, will that be mapped to Light? And actual Light mapped to Thin? Who even decides this? The only way I can be sure I am using the font I want is to explicitly specify the font family, and that immediately breaks the cascading hierarchy of styles. Perhaps this does protect an inexperienced user from messing up their document. But a professional should be able to manage these risks. Please let me break my own hierarchical styles if I foolishly change the Font family from Avenir to Garamond in Base. I know this sounds like I'm 🤯 (I am), but I'm still 😍 with Affinity. I'm doing my first full book project in Publisher, as an attempt to leave InDesign behind. I'm learning the Affinity way as I go along, but I'm also encountering baffling software design choices. As a new (but experienced) user, I hope that these descriptions of my pain points might be helpful for the developers that have put together this amazing set of applications. Maybe I'm still not understanding something. But thanks for listening.

[Affinity Publisher 1.8.4 on MacOS] I'm trying to set up hierarchical ("Based on") text styles for a book I am designing. But the behaviour of the Font settings is preventing it from working correctly. When editing the Font settings of a text style "Based on" another style: Font family defaults to "[No change]" (perfect for hierarchical styles), but Font traits (Italic, etc.) is disabled. (See screenshot attached.) For example, my "Based on" style is in Garamond, and I just want to create a style for Italic. I should be able to simply change the Font traits to "Italic". But the only way to enable the Font traits (so I can choose Italic), is to hard-select Font family: Garamond, then choose Font traits: Italic. Of course that works, but it breaks the cascading hierarchical style. If I later change my "Based on" style to Jenson, the lower-level style remains hard-selected to Garamond. Is this a bug, or is there some good reason for this behaviour? Am I doing something wrong? Thanks for any help you can offer.

Inside the Text Styles tab, when I right-click on a Paragraph Style and select Edit… (Edit “Base Text”, for example), the Edit Text Style window pops up, positioned at the center of the screen. Of course, this is directly over the area of the document I am focusing on, and I immediately must drag it out of the way to see what I’m doing. If this type of window can remember its previous position, rather than always opening to the same fixed position, that would be helpful. Congratulations on your latest Apple award. Affinity Publisher is very promising, and we look forward to being able to replace InD for our publishing needs.