David in Mississippi

It has been just short of a year since my original post here, and the only response I have gotten is from a few kind souls suggesting I use a third-party Mac-only application to do something CLOSE to what I need. While I appreciate everyone who wants to help, the fact remains that this lack of font management capabilities is a serious deficiency in all the Affinity applications. Here's why: 1. FONTS are one of the most crucial elements of just about anything we do with the design work for which Affinity is built. 2. EVERY computer today comes with hundreds of pre-installed fonts, many of which are near identical to other fonts. It is a confusing mess to try to find "just the right font" when we are required to browse through the entire load of installed fonts. 3. Often, even the installed fonts don't serve the purpose, so we have to go out and download additional fonts. I came across a post from another forum user who confesses to being a "font hoarder" and has downloaded hundreds more fonts. When she asked for help, other forum users kindly suggested she needed therapy. Some help 4. EVERYONE, in what I bet is more than 99% of all the things they do on Affinity products, uses only a small number of fonts for everything they do. For people who only use a dozen or fewer, the current "Favorites" list will serve just fine. But what about when I need to find a different slab font, or browse only the handwritten fonts, or am looking for something truly decorative for a unique poster? That's where Affinity has dropped the ball. We don't need or want to be required to search out external, third-party apps to be able to do what we SHOULD be able to do right in the app. So how can we get the Affinity designers to LISTEN to requests like this? And hopefully at least let us know they heard it. Finally, I came here to the forum because I've been continually frustrated by the lack of font management in Affinity, only to find I'd already posted this about a year ago. Sigh. But the complaint is still valid, and is now reinforced.

Thanks for that suggestion, but again, you have redirected the thread from the topic by suggesting an outside application. I use both a PC and a Mac, and Mac applications aren't available on the PC. We need this capability BUILT INTO the Affinity Apps, so we aren't required to turn to a third-party provider to e able to make fast use of one of the most essential elements of design work. I appreciate you trying to help, but I'm sorry I cannot use that.

Thanks for this suggestion, but as seems typical for responses on this forum, you have redirected the request to a different topic. I was not asking about external applications, but for something to be built into the Affinity suite. I use both a PC and a Mac, and Mac-only apps like this are not available on PC. In addition, this won't resolve the dilemma of wading through a kabillion already-installed fonts while scratching my head wondering what's the difference between those 6 fonts that look identical. My point is that Affinity needs to build flexible font management (e.g. user designated categories) into all their Apps. It seems as though the official answer to that is "too bad." Sigh.

That's a GREAT Suggestion, Walt. But you know, I can't help but think it would be even better if Affinity/Serif (and other companies with a huge knowledgebase) would install an AI-powered ChatBot on their help and user manual pages. One company that supplies such a bot is https://fastbots.ai/ - I just heard about them yesterday. Installing such a bot would allow users to have an almost-human conversation with the bot (a la ChatGPT) and get EXACTLY the answer they need, without having to trudge through a thousand pages of possible answers, and still not get what they're looking for. We can hope. Take care.

That's a good thought, fde101. However, I've already tried that, with mostly the same result as here on the forum. Four million results in 0.133929438121 seconds (I just made up those numbers, but they're representative of the true numbers), none of which are truly relevant to my issue. Thanks for the suggestion.

Thanks for this suggestion v_kyr, but I just tried it and it is very awkward. First it requires you to know the dimensions of your canvas, which if you opened an image from another source or from your clipboard, is not apparent in either panel. Second, It seems in the transform panel, there should be a button "Fit long edge to canvas size" but no such button exists. We have to figure that out and manipulate the edges for ourselves. Yes, that's a workaround also, but it requires us the user to be doing work the computer ought to be doing for us. For example, I dragged a "bokeh snow storm onto an image generated by MidJourney, and the asset was at least eight times bigger than the image it was on top of. I used the transform panel to resize the asset, and I had to zoom out to discover that the resized asset was WAAAAYYY off to the northeast of the image. Who in their right mind would think that anyone resizing an image would WANT it to be located far away from the image? This is, to my view, an area in which Affinity could be greatly improved by fixing the issue. Thanks for the suggestion - it's something I hadn't thought of (I'm still learning Affinity), and hopefully, through these discussions, the Affinity development team will get some guidance about how to make their excellent software even better. Take care.

This is an EXCELLENT work-around, James, and thank you for sharing it! Although it's not ideal, it is definitely better than having to zoom out, resize the asset, then zoom back in. Even so, we can rarely get the exact size we want using the place-image tool, so that will also require post-placement adjustment. But I'm happy to know this, and thank you so much!

When dragging an asset onto the canvas, particularly when that asset is furnished by an outside source, those assets always import at the pixel size of that asset. This often results in the asset being 8 to 12 times larger than the canvas, and the only way to see it is to zoom out on the canvas until you can see the borders of the asset, often to a point where the canvas appears smaller than a small fingernail. We need an "Assets Import Setting" choice where we can select to have all assets dragged onto our canvas appear at either (a) the smaller of either CANVASE size or asset size (which would always allow the entire asset to appear on the canvas) or (b) Actual Size. The DEFAULT should be (a), where the maximum import size is the canvas size. As it is, importing a large-size asset always means we have to waste several minutes manipulating the size of it so we can see the thing. If this setting is already available, I apologize, but after several hours of searching on the internet, in the documentation, and online, I cannot find it.

Thanks for your thoughts, Alfred. Because I what I said earlier - the forum has massive quantities of posts, and no matter WHAT search terms you enter, most of the time you won't get ANY threads that are exactly what you want. Instead, you get a very long list of "close but no cigar" topics that you think, "These HAVE to apply, or they wouldn't be on my search results," and you have to spend about an hour filtering through them, reading all of them, before finding out they don't really apply to you. This is a huge waste of my time. On the other hand, computers are very good at processing a large amount of data, very quickly. Depending on the server, all it takes is 1 to 4 seconds to find what is sought, OR tell you "No precise matches." AI software could make these searches infinitely more relevant and targeted, and save us immense amounts of time and frustration. I hope this answers your question. Bottom line, it's much easier and faster for a computer (the forum's server) than to offload that work onto me. It's also more user-friendly. Unlike ChatGPT or other AI large language models that process the entire internet, the forum software would only have to process the content of the forum and the Affinity HELP content. I think it's time they implemented this upgrade.

Before converting over to Affinity Software (I use 8 of the 9 apps, I don't use Publisher on the iPad (yet)), I was a proponent of Xara Designer Pro. In that software, their contour tool had three features I desperately WISH Affinity would make available as well: First, the created contours are DYNAMICALLY LINKED to the object from which the contour is created. This means that once you create the contour based on an object (including text), you can change the source object (such as edit the text), and the contour automatically and dynamically changes with those edits. Second, the created contour is automatically "added" to all elements of that contour. This is especially evident when adding contours to text. Currently in Affinity, if you create a contour on a text object, each letter has its own independent contour, and as you expand the contour, it looks horrible. To fix this, you have to select all the contour elements and use geometry > add to add each letter to make a single contour element. This should happen automatically. To be even better, you might want to also add a setting that gives us a checkbox: "Automatically add contour elements?" Here is an example of what I mean: Third, it would be great to be able to designate the NUMBER OF CONTOUR LAYERS in a single contour. Xara allows you to have a single contour with up to 10 layers, each of which can have a different color. Here is an example: Thanks for considering this - I believe it would boost the usability of the contour tool immensely in the Affinity Suite.

What AFFINITY needs (in all 9 apps) is an ASSETS MANAGEMENT dialog panel. This panel should operate like the Bookmarks dialog in a browser such as Firefox, such that it shows a hierarchical folder structure in the left window pane, and the contents of the selected folder in the right pane, whether those contents be actual assets or more subfolders. In this ASSETS MANAGEMENT dialog, users should be able to: Drag folders to Different locations within the folder structure INSIDE other folders OUTSIDE of their current folder to any location Drag ASSETS to drop them inside any other folder. Hold down CTRL/CMD to drag a copy of that asset, leaving the asset in the original folder. Export a folder to an .afassets file Import an .afassets file and place it anywhere within the folder structure, either as a new folder that defaults to the same name as the .afassets file but is editable, or as individual assets within a folder the user selects. I am relatively new to using Affinity software (6 months), and I love it - but Affinity REALLY needs to be upgraded to allow more things we need, such as Assets Management as described above.

This forum is a GREAT idea, but the biggest frustration I have with it is that there is so much material here, it is very easy to spend more than two hours searching the forum, trying several different ways to phrase our problem, only to find either nothing applies, or the thread is old and closed to new replies. Most times, when I encounter that, I then have to begin searching for how to start a new thread / conversation in that topic. That takes another 30 minutes, just to find it. This forum would be MUCH more useful if (a) you would add a "Start new conversation in THIS Topic" button on every post; and (b) you would implement AI searches, so when, for example, I enter "How to move an asset to a different category," the response would be something intelligible, such as: "I'm sorry, I couldn't find any posts that match your exact search. However, I did find these posts that might be close enough. Check them out, and if none fit, then click the 'Start new conversation' button at the bottom of this page." Implementing this, or something else that solves the "Wall of irrelevant information" problem would go a long way to moving Affinity Forums to the top of the UX pile. Thanks.

One of the problems with a forum like this is there is SO MUCH material, it can take nearly two hours to just find the right thread, only to find it closed to new comments. Thankfully this one is not. It's time to put AI to work to help us find exactly the thread we need for our particular question. Now, on to the comment about this thread: What AFFINITY needs (in all 9 apps) is an ASSETS MANAGEMENT dialog panel. This panel should operate like the Bookmarks dialog in a browser such as Firefox, such that it shows a hierarchical folder structure in the left window pane, and the contents of the selected folder in the right pane, whether those contents be actual assets or more subfolders. In this ASSETS MANAGEMENT dialog, users should be able to: Drag folders to Different locations within the folder structure INSIDE other folders OUTSIDE of their current folder to any location Drag ASSETS to drop them inside any other folder. Hold down CTRL/CMD to drag a copy of that asset, leaving the asset in the original folder. Export a folder to an .afassets file Import an .afassets file and place it anywhere within the folder structure I am relatively new to using Affinity software, and I love it - but it REALLY needs to be upgraded to allow more things we need, such as Assets Management as described above.

Thank you for the response, @Dan C. Okay. Here is the screenshot of the colorcpl dialog: Do you need the "All Profiles" and "Advanced" tabs as well? Then you asked: They are all the default settings from the initial installation (and upgrade to v.2.1): ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: The color picker swatch (beside the eyedropper) does not reflect the color indicateed by the RGB tooltip (white in the first post screenshot), but reflects only the color within the magnified area. As you can tell, this is quite a perplexing issue, and I would love to get it solved. If you can help, it would be wonderful. Thanks and take care!

In Designer (and I think also in Photo) v.2.1, when I use the color picker eyedropper in the Color Studio, the color being displayed in the magnified area and in the color picker swatch does NOT display the color under the cursor, but instead displays a color about halfway between the cursor and the eyedropper icon in the Color Studio. The same thing happened with v.2.0, before I upgraded to 2.1. This does not happen with the Color Picker TOOL (on the toolbar), but only when using the eyedropper from the Color studio, which is usually displayed in the "Right Hand" studio. Here's an annotated screenshot of what I mean: In the image above (and attached, I hope), you should see the color picker selection magnifier hovering over white-and-blue text, which SHOULD make white and/or blue colors appear inside the magnifier. However, the magnifier shows only the medium-dark grey color of the off-image background area about halfway between the magnifier and the eyedropper icon/swatch. In every color picker video I watch, the tutors color picker seems to work as it should. This leads me to believe I have done something wrong to cause this, but for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to make it work as it should. What am I missing? Did I somehow corrupt my installation. Thanks so much for any help you can offer.