DamienG

Technically wrong in that Gutenberg did not get on with "static fonts". Fonts can contain additional instructions/information about how to adjust the points of a glyph before rasterising to pixels. In the case of TrueType fonts it is a stack-based language that allows the points to be snapped/aligned at a general level and even specifically adjusted for individual ppi (point size) levels known as delta hints. There was some early experimentation on re-using this technology to use this for optical sizing but it gave way to the superior mechanisms available in optical fonts.

Nobody said it is. It was a response to the single static font "Gutenberg" nonsense.

They literally tweaked every glyph in the days of metal type - serif sizes, width, contrast, overshoot, ink trap sizes, crossbar height etc. per point size. That isn't available in a static font although the concept of hinting came close but that was only practically used for small sizes and most OS's ignore hints now anyway.

Technically wrong as in the days of metal type each size was individually tailored and adjusted for the size - also known as optical correction - which static fonts do not do but is an option with variable fonts.

What I can't understand is why users come into this thread to tell other users their feature requests are exaggerated or unnecessary. People have needs and requirements and it's not your position as a user of the product to go round telling them they're wrong or overreacting. If this was true then yes it would be less painful but for me, at least on Windows, it is not. A good example is Inter variable. When I install the inter.ttf file on Windows I see 19 correctly named instances (styles) in the Fonts control panel. It looks absolutely fine in WordPad etc. Affinity Photo shows me 19 instances of "Inter" called "Regular" all of which appear to be actually just the thin weight. Absolutely unusable even without axis sliders etc.

While there's nothing definitive that they use Freetype for their rendering the Affinity About dialog "Third party licences" link has two entries for Freetype (admittedly they could be sub-dependencies and not used directly but a lot of cross-platform apps use Freetype as it's very powerful and rendering TTF/OTFs directly without a good library is more complex than most engineers would realize)

They already use the FreeType2 library to render fonts in their packages and it works across all these platforms. It has supported variable fonts (aka variations) since 2017.

Well if all you're going to do is jump in on a thread you care nothing about and bitch about its existence what do you expect?

Nobody asked you to join in this thread. Serif has possibly the most hostile community members I've seen in 20 years of using support forums. Well done for your contribution.

You don't get to choose - it's down to where your credit card billing address is. Our offshore cost of living is already higher than the UK - we pay to go to our doctors, emergency room, shipping on everything, higher food costs, flight costs. What we save not paying VAT we pay elsewhere. We don't need online businesses artificially inflating prices for us as well. You're right they can charge what they like but don't expect people here to like it or put up with it. I was personally already on the fence about this upgrade - I only wanted webp and variable font support and v2 only has one of those.

No, everywhere I use that handles Guernsey and Jersey correctly ensures the post code on the billing address starts GY[0-9] or JE[0-9] and that matches with the CC billing address or it fails to process. VAT exemption is tied to billing addresses in those jurisdictions. Amazon and many other UK and international companies do this.

Glad I found this thread before I pulled the trigger - it's bad enough having to pay for .webp support but not having variable fonts is a deal breaker for me. I don't want to be waiting multiple years and paying again for v3 to get that. (Yes, I get there's a ton of new features and that v1 was supported and enhanced for years as well but when you don't use any of those features at all and just wanted .webp and variable fonts it's incredibly frustrating)

At this point I'm starting to think they're holding back important features like variable fonts and webp support to put into a 2.0 release we have to pay to upgrade to.

Also really wanting support for variable fonts. My use case is I have a lot of variable fonts installed and I'd like to be able to choose them from inside Affinity Designer and then choose from the various axis parameters (e.g. bold, slant, whatever) and have it render properly in Affinity so I can convert to curves. Right now I'm limited to whatever pre-set combinations of static fonts were exported by the variable font vendor which I then have to install probably to find it's not the combination I want. If the axis work is too much then at a minimum listing the variable fonts correctly with the various weights calculated correctly like Wordpad, Paint, Notepad would be something. Right now Affinity packages show the same font name X number of times but with "Light" over and over unlike those apps mentioned which correctly show a number of preset weights for the variable font.