LibreTraining

Yes, I have now been dutifully shamed by the font police. Perhaps you can inform MS that while trying to solve an issue in a popular graphics application I posted some fonts. I am sure they will get their legal department right on it. Soon I will be disgorging my illegal profits to compensate them for the financial harm caused. Right. And the idea that posting some Microsoft created fonts is somehow dangerous is just stupid. And the putting forth idea that I cannot be trusted and could be posting viruses is offensive. You have zero evidence of that. What next, you going to call me racist? Get off your holier than thou high-horse and just go away.

Yes, I also found a Python font tool which was created to clean an OpenType font by just extracting the tables and nothing else (i.e. some script). So that would indicate there was a bad font to fix. Still have not actually seen one though.

Arial has been updated many times. And it is properly configured. And it is OpenType. Some of those fonts have 1998 and 2000 as the create date, and they are the old TrueType file format not the OpenType TT format, and the name fields are not properly configured to modern standards (which is often the source of font cache corruption). So what I suggested is the only way I know to clean-up these old fonts which cause issues. I really do not want to install a bunch of really old poorly constructed fonts because I have learned my lesson about doing this from experience when testing a gazillion fonts in LibreOffice. Had to get real good at cleaning the font cache. Now I have a routine which prevents problems. And as I mentioned above, I fix them first before ever using. Fonts that worked in old apps 10 years ago often just don't work well in modern sophisticated apps. Affinity apps expect fonts to be properly configured to modern standards. They are not as forgiving as other apps, and are less likely to work with bad fonts. You can keep trying, but I think the only solution is to clean house. Also check your Fonts folder and look for font file names ending in _0 or _1 etc. That means duplicates were installed and you may have registry issues. That also takes awhile to clean-up.

Those all appear to be very old free TTF fonts. Not a good idea to install a bunch of those for just this reason. These days I only use old TTF fonts like this if I really need them, and then only after opening them up and fixing all the old junk. Try doing what I suggested above - un-install all the questionable fonts and then restart Windows. See if everything is working with your modern properly constructed fonts. Then test the old fonts. Install only the one you need and see if it works..

What specific fonts have an issue? Please list so we can test the same fonts.

Pecita is just a regular OpenType PS (.otf) font. The larger file size is because it has 4,760 glyphs (4,754 characters). Ligatures (liga) does not appear in the Typography panel (on Windows) because it is not used. They used Contextual Alternates (calt) and Required Ligatures (rlig) instead. Required Ligatures are, well, required ... so I assume that is why there is nothing in the Typography panel to turn them Off. Tested in LibreOffice 7.0.3.1 (x64) and APub v1.8.5.703. Seems to be working fine in both. The image below is an Export to PNG from APub. It does have some odd settings ... the style group subfamily is set to Book - should be Regular, and the Width is set to Expanded - should be Medium (Normal) ... but, those should not affect it as a single font, and it seems to be working. We need more information to help.

Sounds like you are on Windows. You can un-install the offending fonts, and then shutdown Windows, restart Windows and the font cache will rebuild, and then try installing the fonts one-by-one and testing. If that does not work, you need to identify the specific fonts that you are having issues with (e.g. Elegance) so others can test the same fonts.

The font appears to use OpenType Contextual Alternates (calt) and Ligatures (liga) to connect the characters to simulate handwriting. Contextual Alternates and Ligatures are On by default, so there should be no need to select anything in the Typography panel. It should just work. A quick test on my phone appears to work properly: The appearance of transparency makes me suspect this is an SVG font, and you may just be seeing the fallback characters. Or an SBIX (bitmap) font, which would help explain the large file size. SBIX fonts can also have normal vector fallback characters. I will check it tomorrow in APub and various font apps.

@MrAnansi If it was one font it may be that font is the problem. But because you say "I have a number of fonts that will not render at all ..." I suspect you have a corrupted font cache. So shut down all Affinity apps, clear your operating system font cache, and then restart ADesigner. It should then rebuild the Affinity font cache. And hopefully the issue is gone.

Please provide an actual example of code hiding in glyphs.

Hi Patrick, Sorry, have to disagree with you on this one. I think this a perfect example of "fair use." A small snippet of easily available code used to discuss a related issue. I know you guys are careful here, but I think this is a classic case of fair use with zero potential liability. And self-censorship "just in case" isn't a good thing. Update: I was thinking about this a remembered fair use is a USA law, and obviously you are not in the USA. Hmmm. Is there something similar there?

The Gabriola font is an example made by Microsoft showing-off what can be done with OpenType. So they are pushing the limits, and it is overly complex compared to most fonts. Swashes in most fonts are a single lookup table to change a single character to the same character with a swash. In that case you highlight a character and the interface shows you the few options for that particular character. But in this case the character alternates would be hundreds of characters. Hard to show in the Topography interface. Here is the Swash (swsh) OpenType code from Gabriola Copyright font code removed by moderator 29 subtables! Each of the "@CG_xx" is a class of characters (a list). This works out to hundreds of combinations. This is another case of where a user has no idea of a font's features without extensive documentation. The only way I can see to use this is to apply it to all the text and see what happens. So the short answer is the Gabriola swash feature is so complex there is no easy way to display it in the interface. p.s. APub may have an issue dealing properly with the complexity, but hard to tell without extensive testing, and knowing what the font should be doing.

Required a font embedded in a document. So is actually a document issue. And vulnerability was patched years ago. Does not apply to simply installing a font. Still nonsense in this situation.

Nonsense. Please provide any concrete evidence for this ridiculous comment.

Please start a new thread, and include some specific info such as the font used, features missing, etc.