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I've search the forum to see if this was addressed and didn't find anything yet.

I have a number of fonts that will not render at all and are replaced with Arial across Publisher and Designer. When I open up the Font Manager in Publisher, it says that there are unsupported characters. However, I did notice that if I attempt to set up a Character Style, the font is rendered correctly in the browser. Additionally, if I activate the Glyph panel, the font appears correctly and, though time consuming, can be applied.

I saw mention that Variable and SVG types weren't supported but I'm not exactly sure how to check that. The attached image show a list of some of the affected fonts (Arial is just a baseline) and how it appears when viewing the Character Style.

Screenshot 2020-11-10 091330.png

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Have you actually applied the Character Font Style "Style" to the word 'Elegance'? I have noticed that sometimes the font style isn't updated as I edit the style, don't know why and it isn't consistent.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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@MrAnansi

If it was one font it may be that font is the problem.
But because you say "I have a number of fonts that will not render at all ..." I suspect you have a corrupted font cache.
So shut down all Affinity apps, clear your operating system font cache, and then restart ADesigner.
It should then rebuild the Affinity font cache.
And hopefully the issue is gone.

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I've just tried to delete the font cache, which is a lot more complicated than the instructions would have one believe. A lot of programs including Radeon, Dropbox and even Firefox access the font cache. I tried shutting them down and deleting but the remaining files wouldn't even tell me which program had THEM open. Then the cache rebuilt itself while I was trying to clean it out! So, I'm up for ideas. What files I was able to clear didn't do the trick.

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Sounds like you are on Windows.
You can un-install the offending fonts, and then shutdown Windows, restart Windows and the font cache will rebuild, and then try installing the fonts one-by-one and testing.

If that does not work, you need to identify the specific fonts that you are having issues with (e.g. Elegance) so others can test the same fonts.

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Guilty as charged. Some of the specific fonts are featured in that screenshot. I did due a quick test of the fonts across multiple programs and found some interesting results.

Affinity suite, GIMP, Scribus and Inkscape could not read the fonts. However, Corel Painter, Adobe XD, Clip Stuido Paint, Davinci Resolve and Microsoft Office can.

I wonder if it is something else besides a corrupted file or file cache and perhaps a compatibility issue.

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Just my 2 cents worth here:

Stick with open type and true type fonts. *.otf and *.ttf . In other words no Scalable or Colour fonts.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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45 minutes ago, MrAnansi said:

A few examples:

Abigail

Absalom

Batavia

Campbell

Casmira

Elegance

Those all appear to be very old free TTF fonts.
Not a good idea to install a bunch of those for just this reason.
These days I only use old TTF fonts like this if I really need them, and then only after opening them up and fixing all the old junk.

Try doing what I suggested above - un-install all the questionable fonts and then restart Windows.
See if everything is working with your modern properly constructed fonts.
Then test the old fonts.
Install only the one you need and see if it works..

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With all due respect, that seems to be a very "goal post moving" explanation, considering that Arial is just as old and works fine. It's also concerning since other creative programs don't seem to have any issue running these ancient and arcane fonts.

Could it be possible that there's a quirk in the programs themselves and not in the font file? If a designer has to filter through their font library to weed out potentially aged fonts, that is a problem. What's the age cutoff? Are there exceptions?

Again, Affinity at least partially recognizes the fonts as it allows them to run as glyphs. Give it a try and see what I mean.

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Arial has been updated many times.
And it is properly configured.
And it is OpenType.
Some of those fonts have 1998 and 2000 as the create date, and they are the old TrueType file format not the OpenType TT format, and the name fields are not properly configured to modern standards (which is often the source of font cache corruption).

So what I suggested is the only way I know to clean-up these old fonts which cause issues. I really do not want to install a bunch of really old poorly constructed fonts because I have learned my lesson about doing this from experience when testing a gazillion fonts in LibreOffice. Had to get real good at cleaning the font cache. Now I have a routine which prevents problems.

And as I mentioned above, I fix them first before ever using. Fonts that worked in old apps 10 years ago often just don't work well in modern sophisticated apps.

Affinity apps expect fonts to be properly configured to modern standards. They are not as forgiving as other apps, and are less likely to work with bad fonts.

You can keep trying, but I think the only solution is to clean house.

Also check your Fonts folder and  look for font file names ending in _0 or _1 etc.
That means duplicates were installed and you may have registry issues. That also takes awhile to clean-up.

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