loukash

Haha, touché! Well, that's the beauty of understanding the subject of typography, isn't it?

P.S. Of course, I'm not using Arial for PDF export or printing! Hey, I'm not that weird. It's just for the display layout.

That includes my trusty old pre-Retina MBP 2008 as well. In fact, my ambivalent relationship with Arial goes as far back as a purple iMac DV 400, back in 2000… Yeah, same here. For example, my main computer 1994–1998 was my then-flatmate's PowerBook 140 with a monochrome display and a whopping 40 MB hard drive. It could run PageMaker 4 though, so I was happy with it. It depends on the glasses: For reading and for computer work, currently I've recycled the spectacles I was wearing when I was like 12-13, i.e. 45 years ago. (I replaced the frames, of course…) They just work nicely for distances around 50–70 cm. I've posted this screenshot a few years ago in another context on this forum, but here it is, Arial in one of my FM databases in action: With Helvetica – or any other sans serif font for that matter – it just didn't work for me the way I wanted it. The core of this database is over 25 years old. In fact, one of my archived early versions was created on 19 August 1999… ~~~ Back on topic: Hey, it could have been worse! Comic Sans, anyone?

Speaking of Arial, it can cause me literally physical pain when I'm looking at it printed on paper. And boy, was I angry when one of my former clients decided to change their corporate identity and forced me to use Georgia (which is alright) and Arial (ouch!) for the brochures I laid out for them, replacing Helvetica Neue. But… There are instances when Arial is hard to beat in terms of readability, and that's when it's used at small sizes on a computer display. After all, essentially that's what it was originally designed and optimized for. For example, I do some FileMaker programming every now and then: Arial 9pt is perfect for UI labels, and Arial 11pt for text fields, easily readable on any of my 15" MacBooks. And yes, of course at first I tried Helvetica et al; Arial just works better in those situations, no matter how hard I tried…

I don't remember the default MacOS keyboard shortcut for "Emoji & Symbols" as I usually modify many of those shortcuts anyway (hey, my muscle memory goes as far back as System 7 and I don't like to change my habits all too often… ) But it could be that an Affinity shortcut conflicts with it, and overrides it.

@JoJu means the global MacOS Character Viewer which is – confusingly enough – listed in every Edit menu as "Emoji & Symbols" (at least on Ventura).

Yes, but that's in APu only. Exactly, at least in those that are apparently based on NSText. In Photo, you can e.g. use a field in the Metadata panel to temporarily input the shortcuts, then copy & paste into a text frame.

Probably because Affinity text frames don't utilize Apple's NSText framework. Which they can't because otherwise they wouldn't be compatible with the Windows versions. It works with third party text expanders, however. Keyboard Maestro can do it, among many others.

https://affinity.help/publisher2/en-US.lproj/pages/ObjectControl/objectDefaults.html

Bin ganz deiner Meinung! Be aware though that you can change your defaults to fit your workflow. My default font of choice is now Menlo. However, it can be a bit of p.i.t.a. to set up. I still don't remember the exact steps to make it work, but eventually I somehow made it work…

Hi Emilio, this bug still hasn't been fixed. We have explored a couple of very clunky workarounds here:

On Mac, there's a nice free app to batch edit PDF metadata: apps.apple.com/app/pdf-meta/id1595787174

Amazing!

It can read iView catalogs! Well, that's definitely something worth to try.

Ah, I should have read on before replying above… You're actually confirming what I just said. Cheers!