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Hi All, I'm pleased to let you know we have now added support for Variable Fonts to the Affinity Suite on all platforms - available to try now in the 2.5 beta...

Hi All, I'm pleased to let you know we have now added support for Variable Fonts to the Affinity Suite on all platforms - available to try now in the 2.5 beta...

Hi All, I'm pleased to let you know we have now added support for Variable Fonts to the Affinity Suite on all platforms - available to try now in the 2.5 beta...

Hi All, I'm pleased to let you know we have now added support for Variable Fonts to the Affinity Suite on all platforms - available to try now in the 2.5 beta...

Hi All, I'm pleased to let you know we have now added support for Variable Fonts to the Affinity Suite on all platforms - available to try now in the 2.5 beta...

Hi All, I'm pleased to let you know we have now added support for Variable Fonts to the Affinity Suite on all platforms - available to try now in the 2.5 beta...

Hi All, I'm pleased to let you know we have now added support for Variable Fonts to the Affinity Suite on all platforms - available to try now in the 2.5 beta...

Hi All, I'm pleased to let you know we have now added support for Variable Fonts to the Affinity Suite on all platforms - available to try now in the 2.5 beta...

Hi All, I'm pleased to let you know we have now added support for Variable Fonts to the Affinity Suite on all platforms - available to try now in the 2.5 beta...

Hi All, I'm pleased to let you know we have now added support for Variable Fonts to the Affinity Suite on all platforms - available to try now in the 2.5 beta...

Hi All, I'm pleased to let you know we have now added support for Variable Fonts to the Affinity Suite on all platforms - available to try now in the 2.5 beta...

Hi All, I'm pleased to let you know we have now added support for Variable Fonts to the Affinity Suite on all platforms - available to try now in the 2.5 beta...

Hi All, I'm pleased to let you know we have now added support for Variable Fonts to the Affinity Suite on all platforms - available to try now in the 2.5 beta...

Hi All, I'm pleased to let you know we have now added support for Variable Fonts to the Affinity Suite on all platforms - available to try now in the 2.5 beta...

Hi All, I'm pleased to let you know we have now added support for Variable Fonts to the Affinity Suite on all platforms - available to try now in the 2.5 beta...

Hi All, I'm pleased to let you know we have now added support for Variable Fonts to the Affinity Suite on all platforms - available to try now in the 2.5 beta...

Hi All, I'm pleased to let you know we have now added support for Variable Fonts to the Affinity Suite on all platforms - available to try now in the 2.5 beta...

Yes, but it's not flagging it as an incorrect font regardless. Also, as folks move their existing documents from static fonts to variable fonts, no doubt this 'user error in configuration' will come into consideration.

FWIW I had some weirdness in Affinity where I had one document I had opened that used a static version of a font, while I then created a new document that used the variable version (but only having the static or variable version of a font active at one time). I ended up Affinity picking up the 'correct' font, but there were visual glitches in terms of tracking, kerning, metrics, etc. Even copying between Affinity documents was creating some confusion. I'm not entirely sure if this problem is down to only some variable fonts, or if it's potentially a larger problem in the way that Affinity handles these fonts in general. I'll do some more testing later, and try to come up with a solid reproducible test case.

I've noticed some issues with some variable fonts, such as Ohno Softie (Adobe Fonts) where the kerning and tracking is way off from the actual settings. Apple Pages renders the font as you would expect, while Affinity squishes everything (and often inconsistently) together. Example from Apple Pages (above) and the same text in Affinity Designer (below).

There's a noticeable lag with variable fonts (it's there with regular fonts too, it's just not as noticeable) where the text is fuzzy (like a highly compressed JPG) for a moment before it sharpens while being edited/resized/etc. I realize this was probably designed this way for performance reasons, but it's rendered fuzzy for just long enough to be distracting. macOS 14.4, MBP M1-Pro, 32GB.

Hi All, We have just made a new build available of a 2.5.0 beta live - version 2.5.0.2415 - This was created to address improve the new features announced in this post The fix list for this build is here There is one very significant change in that Variable Fonts are supported in this beta for the first time Ash

Hi @Affinityconfusesme, @Alfred, @Bobby Henderson, @Bryan Rieger, @kenmcd, @MikeTO, @ronnyb As you can see I have split these posts about the forthcoming Variable Fonts support made in this thread off into the Beta Members area. The original post by Ash will be repurposed to discuss the implementation of Variable Font support, and the talk here about other implementations (and OT discussion on Colour Fonts) would have got in the way of discussing the actual implementation and any bugs found. The new build 2.5.0.2415 including this feature will be made available soon, and can discussed here

The current SVG table format does not support it. So at a minimum that would have to change - or a new table added. SVG has some advantages but COLR is adding those. Similar to... the current CFF table for OpenType-PS fonts does not support variable - so they added a CFF2 table to be able make variable OTF fonts. But one of the things in the boring-expansion-spec is to be able to put PS curves in the glyf table where the TT curves are now. So the OTF variable fonts may end-up being an Adopey-only thing and not catch on widely. That is being discussed for COLRv2. And perhaps images too (so virtually all SVG advantages would be gone). Behdad posted a summary of the ideas for COLRv2 in the colr-gradients-spec repository on GitHub. SVG fonts are not likely to go away any time soon. They are easy to make and also support a monochrome fallback. SBIX does not have that fallback. Hopefully it will go away. CBDT - Google put that out to pasture in favor of COLR. COLR is the future of color fonts. COLRv0 is stable. COLRv1 is still being tweaked, fixed, and added to. But people can and are making COLRv1 fonts now, both static and variable. You download them from GF, and there are some others in GitHub, and you can find them more and more in places like CreativeMarket, etc. Once COLRv1 is stable then the focus will turn to COLRv2. Color-SVG fonts which are only vectors can fairly easily be converted to COLRv0 and COLRv1. The COLRv0 fonts already work in Affinity. We tested quite a few. Hopefully Affinity will add support for COLRv1 - the sooner the better. Microsoft converted the Win11 Segoe UI Emoji font to COLRv1 a few months ago. So 100% perfectly scalable with gradients. Update Note: an article said the new font had both the v0+v1 formats. But I just dumped the COLR table and it only has COLRv1. So I am not sure how Affinity is currently handling that emoji font on Win11. Guess going forward Affinity is going to have to support COLRv1 to still support color emojis in Win11. It's very late here. I'm rambling... Hope when Affinity adds variable support that it also includes at least COLRv0 variable.

Thanks for the correction. I'm obviously not as well-versed in this as Sérgio. As for them not being able to be made variable, I wasn't sure of that but half-suspected already, and I don't see why it doesn't belong in this discussion, at least as a starting point, because after variable fonts… it's the next obvious omission to tackle. I kindly invite the mods to split the relevant posts into a new thread if need be, of course. I would also add that said fact is not guaranteed to always be the case. If both formats take off, there can certainly be ways of making Colour-SVG fonts support variable axes. As a matter of fact, that same philosophy could be applied to the format and turn colours, and maybe even texture and gradients, into editable “axes”, instead of the format relying exclusively on Stylistic Sets as it still does, and those Stylistic Sets might even work as sub-fonts instead of the system, with their own axes, instead of being just presets of sorts. Regarding that newfangled Open Font Format spec, I like it, though I fear will face a bit of an uphill battle against OpenType. Anyhoo, I'll be watching Behdad Esfahbod's (impressive CV, by the way) stream when I get the time, but I looked at his presentation deck already (he mentioned advantages for the UFO format, which is a good thing, and clearly knows well the history of formats, including arcane stuff such as METAFONT), and the fact that all these bright people are putting their minds to these issues fills me with confidence. I'll be sure to check out all those resources, thanks!