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Fonts not showing correctly in Designer and Photos drop down


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Sites such as ufonts.com offer a wide range of ‘free’ fonts, but many of these are poorly made copies of commercial fonts. There are probably errors in the naming fields of the fonts that you downloaded.

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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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I’m afraid I’m still not convinced that it’s legit! My copy of that typeface (supplied with iOS) has seven styles: your list is missing the Semibold 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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34 minutes ago, imacken said:

I'm not saying it's legit, I'm saying it works OK in other apps, just not Affinity products.

That’s as may be, but what I said earlier still applies:

1 hour ago, Alfred said:

There are probably errors in the naming fields of the fonts that you downloaded.

 

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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11 minutes ago, imacken said:

quite a few fonts, that, prior to me reinstalling Windows, worked OK

Thanks for that extra piece of information! I’m afraid it doesn’t help me to help you, but it may be useful to someone else.

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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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Windows font manager and apps like Word use the older Styling Groups name fields to categorize the fonts. Since these fonts appear to be very old TrueType fonts (1997) you would expect these names to be correctly configured to work in Windows apps, but there may still be errors. This is why they look correct in the Windows font manager.

Modern apps like Affinity use the Typographic Family and Subfamily names (not Styling Groups). It is highly unlikely in fonts this old that these names were correctly configured, and quite possibly not filled-in at all.
Based on your screenshot in your first post, that appears to be the case.

The fonts could be fixed fairly easily.

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21 hours ago, imacken said:

Can you expand on that? Thanks.

These kind of problems are relatively easy compared to other font issues.
Just the font metadata needs to be cleaned-up and that can be done in free tools like FontForge.
You do need to know what to do - that can be learned from the FontLab and/or Glyphs documentation.
What I do ...
Usually the easiest way is to drop all the fonts into FontLab TransType as it enables you to fix both the Typographic Names and Styling Groups all at once,
and it correctly configures the PostScript Name and the Unique Font Name at the same time.
TransType has a few bugs, so bigger families or more severe cases can be done in FontLab.

I did take a look the fonts ... both the Typographic Names and Styling Groups (and the rest) are messed-up.
And really old v1.
Surprised they worked at all.

FYI, sites like ufont are not font sites, they are advertising driven sites which use old fonts for bait.
That is why they don't put the whole family in a single ZIP file (like FontSquirrel or FontLibrary),
but instead force you to go from page to page to get each font to drive the page views.
Zero concern about the quality of the fonts.

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Thanks again. 

I must say that my experience of free font sites is that they do one font family download zip. I have found it is the pay sites that take you to individual pages for each font rather than a complete family download.

I'll have a try of TransType.

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