For me publishing is all about typography and setting beautiful text, whether that's artistic display type or vast amounts of body text. Here are some things I'd like to see Publisher get at some point (but maybe it's just me so I'm interested in people's comments):
1. Font info: In the Font selector show as much information about each font as practical (ideally let the user configure which attributes are shown), and provide a "get info" function to display all available details. Attributes of interest would include licensing flags (embeddable, etc.) existence of Kerning pairs, OpenType features of interest, western language support, CJKV support, etc.
2. Basic Font management: I'd like to be able to organize fonts into groups (potentially having one font in multiple groups). I'd like to be able to attach some notes text to a font that would be viewable as a tooltip say, or an attribute in the font info described above.
3. Optical Kerning support: I've always been a fan of Optical Kerning in InDesign as it eliminates a significant problem when exploring for interesting and special purpose fonts, and the ability to leverage the insane number of free fonts (of wildly varying quantity of course) that exist today, some/many/most/virtually all of which do not include kerning pairs. I suspect many font designers take the attitude that "kerning is a pain in the butt and people can just turn on optical kerning in InDesign so really there's no problem if you don't do the work to create them". In playing with Publisher I've been disappointed to find out just how many fonts I like will be problematic in Publisher due to lack of kerning support. The Affinity response so far is:
"We provide kerning based on tables in the font file. As these are pretty well supported by fonts, doing anything more isn't a priority at the moment."
( https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/65653-tooltip-fix-and-optical-margin-align/&tab=comments#comment-342380 )
which is disappointing. I hope they'll consider it in the future.
vplaas reacted to Zoot in Font management, Font info, Optical Kerning