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A HUGE thanks to the team for this upgrade. Have been wrestling with my first large Affinity Publisher book project – since moving from InDesign – for a couple of months. The file is north of 400 MB with hundreds of illustrations across 317 pages. Just moving through the file by scrolling in the Pages panel took several minutes, and threw up more beach balls than a record attempt in Florida. Updated to 1.10 this morning. Completed an author's correction that would have taken several frustrating minutes in less than half-a-minute. This update is a game changer for those of us working with large files. Ten times faster – seems an understatement. So well done. And now we know where all that developer effort has been directed for the last several months. With that work done, can I put my hand up for some developer attention to supporting variable fonts? An increasing number of new fonts, such as through vendors like MyFonts, include a variable option as matter of course. In the works?

Thanks Walt. I'm not clear on how these are variable fonts, to begin with, there are no variants; e.g., light, condensed, regular, etc.

Figma now has support for RTL fonts (for Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hebrew etc.) and has supported variable fonts — through a plug-in — for some time already. Over the last few years I’ve been a big Affinity fan, and supporter, but Affinity is slipping behind when it comes to typography (there are still some rough edges with font support, especially for those with lots of alternatives and contextual features). Type is central to what most of us use Affinity applications for (especially Publisher) and I’d like to see their type handling be ahead of the curve, rather than perpetually languishing behind it.

Wow. Finally got access to all the Big Sur fonts. Wadda mess. Just being old or from a Type-1 conversion is not a good reason to be crap - there are hundreds of old Type-1 conversions and old font families in MyFonts and they are configured correctly. Commercial font vendors care that their fonts work correctly for the widest audience of buyers. It takes about five minutes to fix the fonts to work properly in all OSs and applications. And there is no downside to configuring them properly. Helvetica Neue - that is one bunch of bizarre fonts. Because of the language coverage I thought it may be a version of Helvetica Neue World. But it has a really odd collection of languages which is obviously custom. It even has Cherokee, but it is from some other serif font (looks like Plantagenet Cherokee). Very weird. There is no rhyme or reason to the style group settings. Which would seem to be on purpose. Avenir Next - again quite odd. And again completely messed-up style group settings. Again, there does not appear to be consistency in how the style group settings are wrong. It just seems random. There are larger font families which are correctly configured (such as Seravek). But are we to believe New Peninim MT came from Monotype already messed-up? Helvetica Neue, and Avenir Next are not going to work properly. And New Peninim MT, and Arial HB, etc. As you mentioned, this also causes problems with apps on the Mac such as Affinity apps, and others. Shipping broken fonts is a really bad practice. Also I find it quite amusing that while the static versions of San Francisco and New York are somehow broken, the variable versions of San Francisco and New York magically have all correct instances. They cannot sabotage the variables or they will not work correctly. 🤣

You've installed a Variable font, but the Affinity applications only support Static fonts.

Is the missing font the "a specific font"? One source of missing fonts in things I have worked with are 'empty paragraphs' (just a carriage return) from imported text files which specify a particular font either in a Paragraph Style or just set in the word processor application. There are some fonts which don't work with the Affinity Applications, Coloured fonts Variable fonts and original PostScript fonts to name a few.

I think this is going to be font related. If you see the attached screenshot, Affinity is picking up some of the text as being in a font called: Source Sans Variable It does appear there is a variable font called Source Sans Variable HOWEVER as we don't support Variable Fonts at the moment, i suspect this is why the text is removed. If you have access to the AI file, you should be able to edit the Text and change it to a non-variable Font, re-save as PDF and that will open fine in Designer.

Welcome to the Affinity forum! Is it possible, that you installed the variable font version? Right now the Affinities do not support variable fonts. So as a workaround you have to install the static version of this font and uninstall the variable font version.

I just started to test Affinity Designer and realized that i can't use my companies font because it's a variable font. I'm afraid we'll have to stick to Adobe in stead of buying Affinity's Designer, Publisher and Photo. The first post i found that asked for variable fonts was from august 2018, so i'm afraid we'll never see this in Affinity. What a pitty.

Thanks, that fixed it. I uninstalled the variable fonts and installed the static fonts. Appreciate the help!

I'm using them on the web more and more (also for print/pdf via PrinceXML), as Google Fonts has been routinely adding more and more high-quality variable fonts. There's a great primer here, a guide from Google here: Variable Fonts Are Here to Stay, and some great inspiration to be found via Typearture, complete with a tutorial and showcase. I wouldn't say they are just for use on the web, as there is nothing stopping other applications from using them (ie. Godot just added support for their upcoming 4.0 release) other than having the intent to do so.

Where are you all using variable fonts? I tried a variable font in Indesign, love the options it gives to adjust a font but it seems that when it came to making a PDF for print the fonts were no good in the PDF for this application. Simple work around was outline the fonts in Indesign. Is this strictly for web use right now?

At work, we use Adobe. I am loving being able to use variable fonts in Indesign. At home, I use Affinity. I want variable fonts! Especially since some of my favourite families are being updated as variable fonts. It’s time.

I am not aware of an Affinity effect not working with text. Maybe I misread your goal … … you would want to create a font including this effects, the so called "variable fonts", which can be coloured / multicoloured within the font file, as mentioned in the various threads in the link above. Whereas you can colourize text in several ways in Affinity + create a shadow with an Affinity effect or another workflow.

Yes, it's variable font (https://github.com/octaviopardo/EBGaramond12) I was not aware that Affinity apps doesn't support variable fonts fully. There is a screencast https://yadi.sk/i/KUz6ZjFtSpapow After checking alternate options it freezes completely.

That's a great point, I personally tested with the variable version, as I had assumed the fact Affinity doesn't fully support variable fonts yet could have been a cause of the issue that the OP was seeing - but it would be good to know which they had installed?

Most people access web sites using the TCP/IP protocols, which were developed in the 70's, so a web site from the 90's is actually quite recent considering what you are going through in order to access it. Good choice. It is already a great program, just one which is not currently well-suited to your particular use case. Not in *all* other respects - no support for RTL or vertical languages, no global layers, questionable practices regarding the handling of global and spot colors, inadequate cross-reference support, virtually no interactive features (other than hyperlinks), no support for spreads of more than two pages, no support for custom slug areas (just a few pre-defined things that can be turned on or off), no support for variable or color fonts, ... ... ... Some users are much more heavily impacted by one or more of those things than by the lack of footnotes and endnotes.

I really would love to have variable fonts working on Publisher. Right now I have to go into Illustrator to work with a variable font for a title. Then I save as an AI file then paste into Publisher. The Adobe ecosystem supports variables. I believe other programs do as well and I have many fonts that are variable and cannot do a thing with them in Affinity.

It’s about time Serif realized that fonts are a key part of desktop publishing. It is very unusual, to say the least, that after 3 years of user’s requests, the Affinity series still does not support variable fonts and OpenType collections.

Just FYI: a recent article about Variable Fonts, some technical & historical info: English (translation): https://translate.google.com/translate?depth=1&hl=de&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=de&tl=en&u=https://www.typografie.info/3/artikel.htm/wissen/was-sind-variable-fonts-r455/ German: https://www.typografie.info/3/artikel.htm/wissen/was-sind-variable-fonts-r455/ It appears to make benefit of their features it requires extra UI, in particular additional sliders for width/weight.

Can you remember exactly how you searched for "variable font"? I've just done a quick check and searching for 'variable' (without the quotes) - 463 total results - from the home page search box got me two fairly obvious results (that were not from this thread) on the first page of results. However, when searching for 'variable font' (again, without the quotes) - 7668 total results - I had to read down to the middle of the third page of results to see anything that looked like what I was looking for. And after searching for 'variable +font' (no quotes) - 7250 total results - I had to, again, go to the third page to see a relevant result. But, after entering 'variable font' (no quotes) into the search terms and ticking "Find results that contain… All of my search words" I got just 45 results, many of which were relevant. You might just need to slightly change how you are searching. I don't use variable fonts myself so I can't really comment on how they should be handled. However, from my perspective, I would say that if I can't trust the software to tell me something simple, such as which variant of the font I'm using, then I can't really trust that it will use that particular font properly at all. If the software can't use it fully and properly then I think it might be best if it doesn't let users use it at all. But maybe that's just me.

I purchased a new monotype font yesterday. This is a "variable" font. Now I am making a document with it. When I export the document to PDF, the different font variations (weight mainly) do not show up in the PDF. When I let my mac save the document as PDF, by choosing print>save as PDF, the variable font shows ok. When I print to a postscript.ps file, and let Adobe Distiller convert the .ps file to PDF the fonts show up allright. So, if the mac can print to PDF, or a postscript file that is created by the printerdriver (I guess) contains the variable font metrics, why can't Publisher create a PDF correctly? Thanks Bob

Yes, all applications on Macs use/integrate the Mac font handler. So it may know how to read the instances properly, but the Affinity apps still cannot use the font instances. On Windows for the Bahnschrift variable font I just see "Regular" listed for all instances. This is the default master - which is the fallback shown and used when variable fonts are not supported. If you search the forum you will see multiple posts regarding variable fonts and color fonts. Neither is yet supported. But they keep saying that support is planned for the future.

Are you downloading and using the individual weights of Oswald, or are you trying to use the single variable version of the font? It sounds like you are trying to use the single variable version. As Affinity applications do not support variable fonts, they show up as a single style. So if this is a case of trying to use the variable font version, uninstall it. Install the other versions.

Switch to Figma, @JHutchinson. Just recently they implemented variable fonts support, among other useful updates. There is so many great things to be written about it, including the community they managed to build. regards, Matt