Font menu missing

[Alkan]

Hello, I'm afraid I'm going mad trying to find out how to do something as basic as changing a font. I have the Artistic Text Tool selected, entered some text using the default font, double-clicked that text, have the text layer selected, but nowhere is any font menu visible. I've looked everywhere, searched every help file, watched video tutorials, you name it, but there's just no font menu anywhere. I'm using Affinity Designer 1.9.3 on macOS (latest versions of OS and all software). I've tried customizing the toolbar, also to no avail.

Can anyone kindly explain: How do we change the font of text we've entered in Designer?

A screenshot with the exact things to click would be greatly appreciated. Please note that I'm just a casual user, not a graphic design pro. This is the software I purchased for occasional vector editing when needed, so please go easy on me. Thanks in advance.

[Old Bruce]

View > Show Context toolbar.

 

[Alkan]

Thanks very much for the quick reply. (How on earth would any new user guess that there's something called a "context toolbar" that we need to enable just to change a font?)

[Old Bruce]

I think it is on by default, but don't quote me on that (I am far too frequently wrong).

There is also the View > Studio > Character which will show you the Character panel and then there is the Paragraph Panel and the Text Styles Panel. If you use a lot of text you may find these panels easier to work with.

[loukash]

3 minutes ago, Alkan said:

a "context toolbar" that we need to enable just to change a font?

You don't need it exclusively in this case.
You can also change a font from the Character panel.

[Alkan]

Thanks—this is all much appreciated. The strange thing is that none of these panels were showing for me, even though I was desperately looking for them. Admittedly this is software meant for graphic designers, who probably have expectations for layers and buttons and panels and the like, but maybe there's some way to make it friendlier to casual users looking to perform very basic tasks? The help menu, search feature, user manual, tutorial videos—none of these mentioned that these panels need to be enabled, let alone how to do so. I'm sure it's all in there, but reading the whole manual just to find out how to change a font seems like overkill.

[loukash]

1 minute ago, Alkan said:

make it friendlier to casual users

Well, frankly, the Affinity suite is being marketed as "pro", so… even a "casual user" should better know what they are doing.

[Alkan]

Isn't that a bit of an arrogant attitude, to be honest? Is choosing a font really a "pro" feature that should be that difficult to find?

[Wosven]

The context toolbar is usually displayed automatically, I don't know why it wasn't for you.

We do minor errors in the begining, and the  forum or the Help are here to help. Stay zen, I'm sure each one of us want to forget our first questions after being more familiar with the UI and the features

[loukash]

1 minute ago, Alkan said:

Isn't that a bit of an arrogant attitude

I didn't want to offend you by any means.
But Affinity apps are advanced and flexible design tools. They have a learning curve. And with flexibility comes complexity. It's inevitable.

Comparably, even me as a "pro", although I've been using e.g. Photoshop since the 1990s, it never was my main tool. And so I only ever knew and used the basics, all those years. Until I began to explore and learn to use Affinity Photo and its advanced features, and started to compare them to the "old" Photoshop CS5.1 that I was still using until then and never really knew what I could have been doing with it.

[Alkan]

7 minutes ago, loukash said:

I didn't want to offend you by any means.
But Affinity apps are advanced and flexible design tools. They have a learning curve. And with flexibility comes complexity. It's inevitable.

No worries, I'm not offended. Most likely I accidentally pressed a keyboard shortcut at some point when trying to do something else, and the contextual menu disappeared then.

I'm sure there's a certain necessary complexity to making a powerful tool like this. Eventually it may make sense even to me, if I stick with it like @Wosven kindly suggests!

Thanks to everyone for your help.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, Alkan said:

The strange thing is that none of these panels were showing for me, even though I was desperately looking for them.

The context toolbar is enabled the first time you start the app so you must have hidden it by accident. Not all the other panels are but to get back to the default Studio panel layout you can use the View > Studio > Reset Studio menu option & start from there. 

Check out the Customizing the workspace help topic for the many, many ways you can set up the panels to your liking, including saving & loading different layouts as presets.

[Alkan]

Thanks, appreciated. I must have accidentally pressed a keyboard shortcut or something.

It would be great if all the tutorials mentioned, "If you don't see this menu, it means the context menu has been hidden. Click here to unhide it." This sort of gentle help really can't be repeated often enough. I'm guessing I'm hardly the only beginner to this kind of software.

[iconoclast]

Just now, iconoclast said:

I may be wrong, but as far as I see, there isn't any document opened on your screenshot. So there can't be a textframe or an Artistic Text. The Font menu in the context toolbar only appears if one of the tools - Textframe or Artistic Text - is active. That makes sense, because you wont need the Font menu without that and it makes the interface much more overseeable and handy. As far as I remember, it's the same in most other graphics programs.

 

[Alkan]

@iconoclast It was just a partial screenshot. There was a document open, the text frame was active, and the Artistic Text tool was selected. The issue did turn out to be that I had accidentally hidden the contextual menu at some point, as others have suggested. No idea how or when I managed to do that; must've been months ago.

[iconoclast]

Ah okay, I suppose you tested out the items of the "View" menu to look what they do and what they are, and you disabled "Show Context Toolbar" this way. That's a classical issue that happens to beginners. No big thing.

[Alkan]

I'm not even sure I did that, to be honest. I thought I must have carelessly triggered the wrong keyboard shortcut, but now I see that there's no shortcut for this feature, so I must have accidentally selected it from the View menu at some point. I'm quite certain I've never even tested out the View menu items, as I'm not a graphic artist and just load this software occasionally to edit or convert an SVG and wouldn't even know what the menu items are supposed to mean. I guess I'm an example of what happens when you put a powerful tool in the wrong hands. 🙂