Better indications for "Missing Fonts"

[muelli75]

Sometimes I open documents that contain fonts that are not activated. Sometimes I don't get a warning about the missing fonts, the document just opens without warning.

The warning is usually displayed, but then it is too inconspicuous for my taste. This essential information should be displayed as clearly as in the competitor product "ID" - there you cannot continue working without clicking away the warning or replacing the step.

 

Regards, Martin

[loukash]

1 hour ago, muelli75 said:

Sometimes I open documents that contain fonts that are not activated. Sometimes I don't get a warning about the missing fonts, the document just opens without warning.

The warning is usually displayed, but then it is too inconspicuous for my taste.

For the feedback to make some sense, you may want to provide more info about the APu version you're using, the operating system, the affected fonts, your font manager, perhaps even some example document, etc., etc.

1 hour ago, muelli75 said:

as in the competitor product "ID" - there you cannot continue working without clicking away the warning or replacing the step.

Ah, that good ole "competitor product"…
How annoying it was having to click away that silly modal window everytime I only wanted to look up something in a years old document…

[muelli75]

22 minutes ago, loukash said:

Ah, that good ole "competitor product"…
How annoying it was having to click away that silly modal window everytime I only wanted to look up something in a years old document…

I agree, but it protects against broken PDFs (without fonts) going to print

 

25 minutes ago, loukash said:

provide more info about the APu version you're using, the operating system, the affected fonts, your font manager, perhaps even some example document,

APu 9.3.1 on BigSur (Intel), Font "Brown" (see http://www.aurelesack.com/works/ll-brown/   http://www.aurelesack.com/works/ll-brown-specimen/), our Fontmanager is Linotype FontExplorer 7.2.6 - a sampledocument is possible, but not for public access.

I also tried APuBeta 1.9.2 1024 - same issue.

[loukash]

Just now, muelli75 said:

but it protects against broken PDFs (without fonts) going to print

Well, it's our job as layouters/designers to double-check every PDF anyway before sending it to print, isn't it?

2 minutes ago, muelli75 said:

on BigSur (Intel)

I remember seeing a few threads about font issues on Bug Sir, er… Big Sur just recently. Search the forum: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/search/&q=fonts big sur&quick=1

I can't help you because my Mac is too "old" running Sir Bug, but…

5 minutes ago, muelli75 said:

Linotype FontExplorer 7.2.6

… I'm using FontExplorer 4 on El Capitan, and sometimes I've noticed some issues with activated fonts not being seen by Affinity at first. Simply launching FontExplorer an disabling/reenabling the fonts usually fixes that. Those things usually have to do with font caches, and those tend to get corrupted every now and then, not just in Affinity context.

[muelli75]

1 minute ago, loukash said:

Well, it's our job as layouters/designers to double-check every PDF anyway before sending it to print, isn't it?

Yes - but checking a document with 64 pages and dozens of advertisments every time you send a layoutsample to the customer ... that is very annoying. In comparison, clicking on a "stop box" is nothing.

We sometimes have 5 to 10 larger projects running at the same time - so a manual check is not possible.

There are some font issues in the context of AffinityProducts and Catalina + Bug Sur which we know. Most of them are easy to edit - but if a missing font is not clearly displayed, then it can be expensive for us as a company. 😞

 

[MEB]

Hi @muelli75,
The warning should be displayed if there's missing fonts however its possible interactions with third party fonts managers/caches cause some issues. In any case you can check if there's missing fonts going to the Font Manager (the Warning should also have  direct button/link to it), going to the Character Panel and setting the first dropdown (top left) to Missing Fonts, looking and the context toolbar when there's a text object selected - it should display a "?" before the font family and also through the Preflight panel which should warn about any missing fonts.

I'm also using FontExplorer X Pro - i will keep a look at it to see if i can reproduce the issue here. Have you noticed if the fonts that are missing are consistently the same? Are you able to use them normally when you enable them manually?

[loukash]

@muelli75, you're aware that you can set up FontExplorer to auto-activate fonts even with Affinity?

I've only been using it "experimentally" so far because in general, I've always found font auto-activation an annoying feature, and I've never used it with Adobe apps either.
For Affinity, it only works while the FontExplorer app is running. (And that's totally okay with me.)

[MEB]

Unfortunately auto-activation causes a few issues in some circumstances as well. I have suggested it previously but find out it may cause the app to crash. It works fine through direct plugins as it does for Adobe apps but not so well in our case when intercepting font calls.

[muelli75]

Thanks to all - I didn know this feature in FEX. Tried it now - and it seems to work.

Got the message that the missing font (brown) is activating in FEX ... but its still not active for APu.

 

See Screenshots, first this block should be "Brown Light"- but it is subsituted. This screeshot was taken after FEX displayed that this missing font is activating.

 

 

 

 

 

This is FEX, after displaying "Brown Light is activating"

 

After disabling "Brown Light" in FEX by hand and reactivating it, APu recognized the font:

 

So this FEX-Feature is the first step in the right direction. But not the full solution.

 

Thanks to all involved.