System installed font missing in Affinity Photo

[ateleman]

Hello,

I'm working with Affinity Photo 1.8.6 on a Mac running OS 10.14.6

I have the 'Symbol' font installed in the operating system (ie Font Book.app). It's a standard font that always comes with the operating system and is used for greek symbols/letters. Here's a snapshot

In all other applications I'm using (e.g. Microsoft Word), the Symbol font is working just fine.

In Affinity Photo, the Symbol font does appear in the drop-down font menu when I select "All Fonts" as the category. However, if I type some text, highlight it, then select "Symbol" from the drop-down menu, it doesn't work. Instead, an exclamation mark appears in front of the font name, and on the canvas the Symbol font is not displayed:

So somehow it seems that Affinity Photo is having problems accessing this font? Is there any way to fix this?

Thanks !

 

[loukash]

1 hour ago, ateleman said:

if I type some text, highlight it, then select "Symbol" from the drop-down menu, it doesn't work. Instead, an exclamation mark appears in front of the font name, and on the canvas the Symbol font is not displayed:

Affinity Ph/De/Pu all only do the right thing: they display the characters that are not available in Symbol using a substitute font. Symbol mainly contains characters from the Greek codepage as well as mathematical symbols. Unless you actually type/insert those very Unicode characters, Symbol has nothing meaningful to display.

See View menu > Studio > Glyph Browser

It's a feature, not a bug.

[loukash]

1 hour ago, ateleman said:

on the canvas the Symbol font is not displayed

Also, if you need the same typeface for any other – non Greek and non-math – text, use Times. It's exactly the same.

[ateleman]

I see - thank you !

(Some info for other users in case anyone else bumps into this same issue: If I understand correctly, for some reason most other programs do the 'incorrect' thing: I wanted an 'alpha' which is Unicode U+03b1 in the Symbol font. In most programs, this appears on the screen when you type an 'a' on the keyboard using the symbol font. However,  keyboard 'a' should actually correspond to unicode U+0061... So I guess  programs like Microsoft Word somehow translate the user's intention..)

Thanks for the quick reply !

[loukash]

27 minutes ago, ateleman said:

If I understand correctly, for some reason most other programs do the 'incorrect' thing

I'd say so.

On the other hand, take TextEdit, for example: It doesn't even show you Symbol as an option. It's essentially kinda "background system font". Probably also for historical compatibility reasons, as it's been already present back in the Mac OS "Classic" days, at least back to System 7! I just checked launching the Mini vMac emulator on which I have a System 7.5.5 running. Don't remember if Symbol already was in System 6; hey, it's been over 30 years ago…

So, today's standard MacOS software usually doesn't ever need Symbol beacuse you can always simply insert any characters as you see fit using the global "Emoji & Symbols" palette. And if you'd want to type Greek, you'd likely simply activate the corresponding keyboard layout.

27 minutes ago, ateleman said:

programs like Microsoft Word somehow translate the user's intention

Someone fire Clippy already!