R C-R

FWIW, this is where it is shown in the first post by @Ash after the "Variation settings on iPad." text.

Did you try Settings > Fonts in one of the iPad Affinity apps? EDIT: Annoyingly, I cannot figure out how to install any of the iPad 2.5 betas on my iPad. It keeps asking for a Redeem code which I do not have & have forgotten where to request one.

I think it is because those snapping options apply to entire objects, not the individual nodes of shape objects, but that is just a guess.

FWIW, I just tried it with AD 2.4.2 & the Roboto Flex font & the PDF exported without any apparent issues.

Hmmm. I downloaded the Roboto Flex file from Google Fonts & double-clicked on it. That opened a small Font Book window with an "Install Font" button. I clicked that & the font was installed without complaint & immediately showed up in Font Book. I selected it & used File > Validate Font & it reported no errors. I just checked in the AD 2.5 beta & it is available & works as expected. EDIT: I doubt it makes any difference but like @MikeTO mentioned, my default installation location in Font Book is set to "User," not "Computer."

Thanks, but my only concern was using the style in the Affinity apps, as I have no reason to export it to PDF.

I'm not sure what you mean by properly, but I can use any of the named variable font styles in 2.4.2, either from the Font Family or Font Style dropdown on the Context toolbar & get those named styles to set the style of the selected text to the named one. Of course, there are no variable options if that is what you mean. On Windows does selecting one of the misnamed styles work to set or change the style blindly or not work at all?

This may be off topic but I thought I'd mention it here since it is related to variable fonts & maybe someone can help me understand what I am seeing in the current V2.4.2 retail apps. Anyway, after installing the Shantell Sans-Variable Font to test it with the beta, I was curious to see how the retail apps handled it. I was surprised that unlike the typical multiple instances of "Regular" or whatever that users have been reporting when they have installed variable fonts, I got a list of its (preset?) styles & each of them works as expected: Same with the 6 PlayFair Display (preset?) styles. EDIT: I think what happened is even though I used Font Book to open just the PlayfairDisplay-VariableFont_wght.ttf & ShantellSans-VariableFont_BNCE,INFM,SPAC,wght.ttf files I downloaded from Google Fonts, when I clicked the "Install Font" button in Font Book, for some reason it installed the static fonts as well, but I can't be sure about that.

Off topic but if for whatever reason you want not to add spaces between paragraphs in replies in these forums, you can use Shift + Return instead of Return. i mostly use it only when I want to quote a post to insert a {...} marker indicating I have omitted part of the quote, like below:

Exactly! We are there, in the here & now. And in the here & now you got a reply explaining in plain language that things have not changed in this respect, that they still will not comment on if ideas or suggestions are accepted or rejected, & why that is.

It can be done in exactly the same way it is now, via the feedback & suggestions forums, & the beta program. But the point is Serif has already been acquired by Canva so we are already in this "new age" you keep talking about, & the policy has not changed. Please just accept it & move on.

Then you can use File > Reveal in Finder to open a window in Finder showing the folder the file is in. You can then drag & drop that folder's title into the export window in Affinity to automatically change the save location to that folder. This works with any app on Macs when you want to save a file to a location you can show in a Finder window.

Yes, Serif has been bought by Canva & as @Patrick Connor has told you the policy has not been changed.

Does turning off "Wet Edges" in the Context Toolbar get you what you want?

In your screenshot, did you overlook the red text telling you that you need to update both Affinity Designer & Affinity Photo for StudioLink to work?

DPI is irrelevant unless the file is printed, at which time it can be set to anything, since it is just metadata that the printer may or may not use. EDIT: please refer to https://affinityspotlight.com/article/understanding-dpi/ for more about this.

In point of fact, quite often it is suggested to try a different graphics driver or to check for conflicting 3rd party stuff known to cause issues with the app. If that leads to a solution that allows the use of hardware acceleration then the issue typically is considered resolved by the user. How specifically could this self-test routine change the settings to avoid a crash that stops the test? Once it crashes, that's it. There is nothing left to say why it did or if it is fixable.

If nothing else, imagine how users would react if the crash was caused by an incompatible add-on & they later learned that by simply either removing it or making an exception for AP if it provides for that, then they could use hardware acceleration. Same for a damaged or missing file (in either the app or the OS) that could be replaced with a good copy.

No, it just means that something in a thread running in the benchmark test that was using hardware acceleration caused a thread crash, but that by itself does not mean hardware acceleration is unusable. This is because there could be other causes that if identified & eliminated could make it usable. I mentioned several examples of fixable causes above.

What info specifically could any app recover from a thread that has crashed, other than that it has terminated for some reason? After all, there could be several different causes for that, including conflicts with third party 'helper' add-ons, hardware level component defects, or damaged/corrupted files or the file system itself. Few of these things should prevent the user from enabling hardware acceleration, if nothing else for diagnostic reasons.

As for the "touching the text" part, for Frame Text the Paragraph panel has various controls that allow you to set the alignment, justification, & spacing on a paragraph by paragraph basis.

Actually, a lot of the topics are about Affinity itself crashing, not just one of its threads. But even if it is just one or a few threads that crash all the app can do is terminate those threads, so if that thread is one of those the benchmark must run during the test, there is no way the app can get any performance info from that test other than it did not complete after some pre-defined period of time. Same problem if the app hangs & has to be force-quit. What it might be able to do is write a temp file somewhere before starting the test with info about its start time & what configuration it is testing & delete it if the test completes, so if the app has to be restarted by the user it could check for that, but I do not see any way the app could automatically restart itself.

I don't see how AP itself could 'handle' anything if it crashed or hung while running the benchmark. It seems to me this is something only the OS could detect.

They do, but over the years there have been so many different feature requests (including disagreements about how they should be implemented) that they have been forced to pick & choose sparingly among the ones they think will benefit the greatest number of users to focus their development efforts on. There are hopes that now that deep-pockets Canva has acquired the company that things will improve in this respect but nobody can say with any certainty if that is realistic or not.

How could it do that if the app crashed while running the benchmark or if the driver never returned control to the app? Doesn't the app have to complete the benchmark test to gather any info about the results?