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Font weight listing is very confusing to work with


abarkalo

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I started a thread in feedback on font organization but now honestly this issue has turned into a bug or a glitch and wanted to address it here.  My original request/complaint was that Affinity Publisher (or any Affinity product) could handle font organization better, grouping the widths together as a condensed/normal/extended format. Adobe does it this way and it works well.

Now however, I sent feedback to a font foundry because I thought they had mislabeled SemiExpanded to be wider that Expanded. They told me it was the case with my software not their font. I looked again and realized they were correct and want to share a screen grab from Affinity and another from Photoshop to compare. Please see how the weights and widths organization is messy but the optical illusions of the widths. It seems the word length is squeezing down the sizes as well. 

Since Affinity Publisher is a master layout assembly tool especially where typography plays a critical role, and where many designers use thousands of fonts and many superfamilies that are extremely difficult to navigate through in the current font organization scheme, I ask for the fonts to be displayed as they are with Adobe.  This would help tremendously. I love Affinity products but this is issue a thing to deal with.

Affinity.thumb.png.4e963119f762c455f1b6d358807ca753.png.8c23100198aa633c699cc75e6d68cf1c.pngPhotoshop.thumb.png.64e3f8d04946ddfd2497b40d5ed7f659.png.2eaa9c3ee7ba35e1c4930c3169624bc9.png

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39 minutes ago, LibreTraining said:

I do not see this "optical illusions of the widths" you mention above.

I think the issue is that there is no consistent sample text (such as the word ‘Sample’) so the user ends up comparing ‘SemiBold SemiExpanded’ with ‘SemiBold Expanded’, and because of the extra ‘Semi’ the first of those samples is longer than the second one. It’s worth noting that if you compare the first words only, you can immediately see that the text ‘SemiBold’ in the semi-expanded style is (as expected) narrower than the text ‘SemiBold’ in the expanded style.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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  • 3 weeks later...

My only point in my post is that it would be great to list the fonts according to weights, like InDesign does it (see right side of the image). See that the condensed group comes before the normal group, which comes before the expanded groups. InDesign may not show the optical widths of the font and I don't care - I can scroll down the list in a live preview. I care about this because it helps me make design picks much faster.  

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  • Staff

Hi abarkalo,
 

I believe this has been mentioned before, however I don't have a font that demonstrates why its important quite like that one does. Would it be possible for you to attach a copy of the Ruston Basic font to our internal Dropbox account using the link below please?
https://www.dropbox.com/request/ry4KJCc2j7yGQ2QE9rZg

Thanks!

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