Font styles are duplicated in AD by Font Book collections

[Gear maker]

In AD, any version, the Collection subgroups in Font Book are read as additional fonts.  For example the font STHeiti.  Is in Font Book "All Fonts" but not the Collection "Test".

Then as soon as I add STHeiti to the Test Collection in Font Book (and restart AD) the All Fonts looks correct with 2 font styles.

Then I go to the Test collection in AD and now the STHeiti has 4 font styles not 2.

And going back to All Fonts there are also 4 font styles showing now instead of the 2.  If I do a Font Reset or exit and renter AD it will be back to 2 font styles.

[thomaso]

Possibly this issue is caused by the way macOS fontbook and/or Affinity handles font names in various differing wordings/translations. That also might be a reason for the identical visual preview displayed in the font list shown above in @Gear maker's screenshots for STHeiti "Light" vs. "Regular".

In a recent discussion in "Questions", related to this "Bugs" topic, this post mentions a few more details about fontbook's flexible, confusing font names:

 

[Sean P]

Hi Gear maker,

Thanks for letting us know - this has previously been reported and is with development to be fixed. I will get your comments passed over and get it bumped with them. 

[Gear maker]

2 hours ago, Sean P said:

Hi Gear maker,

Thanks for letting us know - this has previously been reported and is with development to be fixed. I will get your comments passed over and get it bumped with them. 

Sean, 

We have been trying to confirm if the problem is happening in AD or if it's a collection problem is Font Book. In my system the Adobe Heiti Std font is found in 3 locations the All Files, English smart collection, Sans Serif collection

I found that the Font Book collections are stored in ~/Library/FontCollections  FYI that holds Collections and Smart Collections except for the English smart collection I haven't found where that is located.

I tried a few things, but I think the most interesting is that I removed the Sans Serif.collection file.  And now I always get only 2 font styles listed in AD.  I put the file back in and then get 3 font styles in AD.

I then used the Adobe Heiti Std font in a drawing so it was entered in the Recents collection in AD and now I have 4 font styles.  There is no Recents collection in Font Book.  I think that confirms that it is AD that is adding up all the styles found in the collections.

Thanks for your help.  Mike