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QuarkXPress comes in at a significantly higher price point than the entire Affinity suite, and they do not seem to fully support variable fonts yet either (though they have said it is on the roadmap for several years now).

There are plenty of free fonts (not variable) from Google Fonts, and elsewhere, you don’t need to spend lots of money!

Do you even consider the fact that some people choose not to use Adobe out of PRINCIPLE? I can afford to use Adobe products, but I despise the companies practises. I also don't want software that crashes every ten minutes like Photoshop and Premiere. However, I am really miffed to have bought the whole Affinity suite to find out that I cannot use variable fonts. It's a bit rich to promote a product so heavily as an affordable alternative, when you would need to outlay thousands of pounds to equip yourself with fonts in Affinity that you can get for free from Google. Furthermore, learning any piece of software is an investment in itself. A huge investment. Do I really have to go and spend weeks learning how to use InDesign now, and putting up with all the errors and crashing because Affinity is only interested in the amateur marketplace? 4 years of complaining and not a peep out of the developers. Shame on you.

Sounds like you also installed the variable fonts. Cannot have the variable fonts installed at the same time (with Google Fonts fonts). There are name conflicts between the variable instances and the static fonts. So, no GF variable fonts at the same time as the statics. And Affinity apps cannot use the variable font anyway. Yeah. These are really nice fonts. Definitely one of the better GF text fonts for sure.

SVG files are text file - open it and look. It appears the font family is Open Sans, and it is probably the Regular (so select just that). The original Open Sans Regular font only has "Open Sans" in the PostScript Name. No Regular weight is listed. So perhaps that is where it came from. This happens quite a bit when Affinity opens other documents (no Font Style). So just select the text and apply the Regular weight (Font Style). Note the Regular weight in the original Open Sans does not match the Regular weight in the current Google Fonts version (they adjusted some of the weights when they made the variable font). So your original document may not look the same with the newer fonts. You may want to use the original fonts if you need to replicate something.

Nice. Thanks for the links. This may be a redundant question, but is there no way of taking a variable font and turning it into a static font via third party software? It's a shame that Affinity Publisher aims itself at a marketplace that forces the user to have to pay for fonts, rather than be able to use Google Free fonts. I had to pay for Microsoft Word today. So my £60 purchase of Affinity Publisher has now cost me £126. It would cost me potentially thousands more for a decent set of fonts for commercial publication.

I would advise to use only the static fonts as these will be supported in the affinities and maybe other apps as well that do not support variable fonts. You can store the variable fonts for the future where it may be possible to use it in any and/or all apps.

J3rry, In both weight and width, variable fonts allow you to control those values beyond the presets, so if you think the bold is to bold and the semibold too thin, you can set the weight somewhere in the middle. But variable fonts allow you to control more things, such as optical sizing, the length of serifs. Recursive Sans is a great example of what can be done: IT allows you to control weight, slant, "casualness" and "monospaceness"

One year later still waiting for this: Variable fonts allow users fine control over typographic properties such as weight and width, beyond what regular fonts can do. I hope Affinity can finally support them.

Hi @philipt18, On your new Mac do you happen to have the Variable version of Montserrat installed instead of the Static version? If you are using the Variable version this would likely explain the problem you are seeing since Affinity apps don't currently support Variable fonts... You would need to uninstall the Variable version of Montserrat and then install the Static version which should then allow you to specify specific different weights. Both the Variable and Static versions are available in the same download from Google Fonts...

Note that Affinity does not support Variable/Colour Fonts yet. – Compare this recent thread with possible workarounds:

Just in case anyone is following this thread and curious about how things turned out. To recap: for the original project I used InkScape and built a page with all the text strings I needed on it in the specified font and weight. I output that as a PDF with text-to-curves set in the export. This then imports nicely into Designer. I then selected the sets of curves, group & name them ready for insertion into the existing project to replace the original text in the old font. It all worked fine. I should probably point out that InkScape didn't handle every instance correctly and for some strings created duplicates where there should have been some variation. For the future, and to protect me from the panic this caused, I want a solution that is more direct. I now know (thanks @kenmcd) to ask directly for the static font equivalents in the weights, width etc., of the variable font being offered. This would be the best approach until Serif add full support for variable fonts. Failing that I can use this software https://github.com/jonpalmisc/vfit to create static instances of a variable font if I know the weights etc. that are required. I used this today and it worked very well creating a collection of individual weight and widths of the variable font. Now I'm well prepared for any future work on this project. In case anyone is curious here's a web page that appears to have checked the status of recent applications that can and cannot handle variable fonts: https://v-fonts.com/support/ I can't vouch for the accuracy but the handful I've checked appear to be correct.

I get that, Thomas. Even the simplest things are often significantly more complex than we think. Honestly, I’d rather see R&D budget prioritized for something important that has no workarounds like variable fonts instead of it going to on a tool like vector tracing that we can workaround doing by hand.

So, lots of pressure here on Affinity to do this. I just want to comment a bit on something. And please note, this is from the perspective that I personally love variable fonts, have made a bunch of them, and can’t imagine personally paying to license any general design tool today that does not support them decently. Variable font support is NOT trivial It isn’t just a matter of enabling something. And no, switching out their back-end font engine for Harfbuzz would not be trivial, and even if it were, that would not solve the problem! Don’t get me wrong, either supporting Harfbuzz or supporting variable fonts in their own engine is a huge amount of work. So many assumptions need to be thrown away, in either case. APIs reworked... agh. But the other huge deal is: user interface aspects of variable fonts are a huge hassle. The names and contents of axes are completely arbitrary and not known in advance by app developers. What is the most axes a font can have? 64K. Maybe the app has some arbitrary limit lower than that. How fine should the stops be on an axis? How many predefined instances should they support per axis? How do they expose predefined instances for variable fonts and how do they make those interact with user-defined instances? Do they just use sliders for everything? Do they support decimals in axis positions or only whole numbers? Manual input of position coordinates, or only the sliders? And on and on. Without going into the same detail, impacts on layout are similarly huge. Writing this as former fonts product manager at Adobe (until December 2008), later product management for font management and web fonts at Extensis, and CEO of FontLab Anyway, I am eager to see this support in Serif’s Affinity products, but please understand it is a heck of a lot of work! (Is that enough italics and boldface for one post, or should I throw in some more gratuitously here?)

You haven’t heard the story before, because it is absolutely untrue. First, Adobe stopped making new fonts in Type 1 format very early in their switch to OpenType. Before they even shipped their first retail OpenType fonts in the year 2000. That included Type 1 MM fonts. Originally Adobe intended to have and ship OpenType Multiple Master fonts among their first OpenType fonts. The format was fully spec’d and fonts were being developed. Dan Mills at Adobe decided to drop the MM part for two reasons: 1) Microsoft had zero interest in MM OpenType at the time, and was proving a reluctant partner on that part of things. But that was not the same as pressure, and there was no quid pro quo that I ever heard at the time. 2) OpenType layout features and the rest of it was a hard enough sell without the MM part at the same time. Dan was concerned OpenType might not succeed if MM was bundled in there from the beginning. Some of us at Adobe were pretty unhappy when Dan told us (the type team) of his decision (in 1999 IIRC?). David Lemon and I talked about it at great length. But as much as we loved MM (and love variable fonts now) we were not convinced he was wrong. I believe I recall saying exactly that to David, and him agreeing, before we even left the room. I remember David Lemon and I talking about how maybe some day we could bring back MM in OpenType. It took 17 years, but it happened at ATypI in Warsaw in 2016. And that time around, Adobe (David), Microsoft (Greg), Apple (Ned) and Google (Behdad) all did it as a joint announcement—although Apple was coy about committing to support for the new stuff, as it was based fairly directly on the GX Variations tech, it seemed pretty clear they were down for it.

Noto Sans Display static fonts are available here (in the old repo): https://github.com/notofonts/noto-fonts/tree/main/hinted/ttf/NotoSansDisplay and here: Noto_Sans_Display.(2022-06-30).zip Note: this repo/zip has all four static widths. Lora full release with static fonts (OTF+TTF) is available here: https://github.com/cyrealtype/Lora-Cyrillic/releases/tag/v3.005 and here: Lora-v3.005.(2023-01-16).release.zip Sure sign of a variable font (one that may not be configured properly).

These articles could enlighten you better than I could about the difference between static fonts (with different files for italic, bold, extrabold,…) and variable fonts (a single file with variable axis giving access to different variations of letters): • https://www.browserstack.com/guide/variable-fonts-vs-static-fonts#:~:text=Static Fonts maintain a different,support CSS transition and animation. • https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/introducing_type/introducing_variable_fonts Noto is possibly disponible as static fonts (but I couldn't find it…): https://fonts.google.com/noto Unfortunately, Lora is not: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lora Perhaps could you consider using other fonts if you want to work with Affinity?

Just do a web search on "variable fonts" if you do not know what they are. For instance, one of the hits will be https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/introducing_type/introducing_variable_fonts, which explains how they differ from regular fonts.

Google Fonts fonttools instancer works well (Python). FontLab - open variable font, check the box to export named instances as fonts, push the button. You may want to do some renaming to prevent name conflicts with the variable font. So they can both be installed at the same time. The user in the discussion below used fonttools. Or PM me the font - it would take about 15 minutes with name fixes.

That's part of the issue with Variable fonts: they're not supported in PDF files. Instead, the application needs to generate Static versions of the fonts to embed in the PDF file, and Affinity doesn't do that.

The solution is to avoid using Variable fonts; only Static fonts are supported in the Affinity applications. Your client will need to provide a statis version of that font, or you will need to use a different application.

Could it be that these fonts are variable fonts? Affinity does not support variable fonts and requires that you install the static variants for this font.

Hi @Alexeir and welcome to the forums. This is a variable Font. Variable Fonts are not supported yet by Affinity programmes. If needed, install the static version of these font.

Agreed, along with variable fonts, and this has been brought up many times in the past. For something like this particular example you can use a normal font and make the text a mask for a picture (in this case of a flag) behind the text, but it would obviously be more convenient to use a pre-rigged font like that, and other examples of color fonts may not be quite so easy to mimic in that manner.

Why? For the same reason it doesn't handle Variable fonts, probably.