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Posted

Publisher 1.10.4 on Mac frequently states that a font is not in an imported document when in fact it is. Publisher seems to see some fonts incorrectly, most often happens with Adobe Fonts. The solution is simple … you have to scroll through the fonts on your Mac to show Publisher that it really is there and then Publisher will recognize it. Should a user not be aware of this Publisher will substitute a font that it designates. The problem here is that because of the mis-identification to begin with the substitution is frequently not the beat of possible options available onboard the Mac.

One other suggestion… there need to be a simple method either through Font Usage or when the document is opened to allow the user to easily and directly substitute the font in all of its Faces via menu throughout the entire document. This can be done by Find & Replace but that is cumbersome and the result is that kerning etc is disturbed.

Posted

We users do not necessarily see the actual name of the font, we see a shorter simpler name. So it would appear that font names can be the same for two different fonts. That is probably what Publisher is reporting.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.6 
Affinity Designer 2.5.7 | Affinity Photo 2.5.7 | Affinity Publisher 2.5.7 | Beta versions as they appear.

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

Posted

No…Publisher is not recognizing the Font by it given name by the Font Creator.

Posted
22 minutes ago, JohnGregory52 said:

No…Publisher is not recognizing the Font by it given name by the Font Creator.

A font file contains multiple versions of the name, and sometimes a font creator makes a mistake and sets some of them incorrectly.

Your description of "scrolling through the fonts" (where?) is intriguing.

But if this is happening in a way that's recreatable, and with specific fonts, it would be useful if you could provide:

  • the font names; and
  • the names of the font files on your system; and
  • copies of the font files (though depending on which fonts they are, due to licensing you may want to provide them privately to Serif).

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
    Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2,  16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.3, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1

Posted

When you open a PDF the app either says all fonts are available or missing. In the Missing List you can click on the font name and scroll through the fonts on your Mac and choose the correct one. Having done that the app will agree that all fonts are present and no substitution is necessary.

Posted
12 minutes ago, JohnGregory52 said:

In the Missing List you can click on the font name and scroll through the fonts on your Mac and choose the correct one. Having done that the app will agree that all fonts are present and no substitution is necessary.

Having done that, you have performed a font substitution. At that point nothing is missing, because you substituted it.

The fact that the font name it said was missing appears to match the font name you've chosen from the list doesn't really matter. The fonts probably do have different names, in some way, as I understand it.

Without a PDF that demonstrates this, and the font file that you're choosing to replace it, I don't think this can be answered in detail. But I know there are other Affinity users here who can provide more details about all the different names that a font can have, than I can provide.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
    Desktop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 64GB memory, AMD Ryzen 9 5900 12-Core @ 3.00 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 

    Laptop:  Windows 11 Pro 23H2, 32GB memory, Intel Core i7-10750H @ 2.60GHz, Intel UHD Graphics Comet Lake GT2 and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Laptop GPU.
    Laptop 2: Windows 11 Pro 24H2,  16GB memory, Snapdragon(R) X Elite - X1E80100 - Qualcomm(R) Oryon(TM) 12 Core CPU 4.01 GHz, Qualcomm(R) Adreno(TM) X1-85 GPU
iPad:  iPad Pro M1, 12.9": iPadOS 18.3, Apple Pencil 2, Magic Keyboard 
Mac:  2023 M2 MacBook Air 15", 16GB memory, macOS Sequoia 15.0.1

Posted
7 hours ago, JohnGregory52 said:

Publisher 1.10.4 on Mac frequently states that a font is not in an imported document when in fact it is. Publisher seems to see some fonts incorrectly, most often happens with Adobe Fonts.

A few different things happening here...

First, fonts embedded in a PDF are supposed to be identified by the PostScript Name.
PostScript Name is a specific field in the font name table.
According to the PDF specs that name should have a specific format.
Unfortunately some applications do not follow that format.
Correct format: FontName-Regular
Wrong format: FontName,Regular
Affinity apps see those as two different fonts.
I think this is the fourth time I have said this ....
Affinity apps should know that: FontName,Regular = FontName-Regular
Adopy apps know this.

Second, some fonts have bad names in the PostScript Name field.
The names are simply done wrong and thus the font cannot be determined correctly.
Some have weird name formats.
Some have the same data in every font in a family (which leads to name conflicts).
Many MS fonts just omit the style part from the PostScript Name for the regular weight.
(e.g. ArialMT rather than ArialMT-Regular - they do this with quite a few fonts, which confuses some apps)

Third, occasionally some OpenType-PS (OTF) fonts do not have the correct name in the CFF table. When OpenType-PS fonts are embedded in a PDF, it only embeds the CFF table (which has all the PS glyphs). The CFF table also has a PostScript Name field which should match the PS name field in the name table. Sometimes they do not match - which creates problems identifying the font on import.

Finally, you are right, the Affinity apps could have a much better procedure and dialog on import to match the fonts correctly. And it should be better at determining or guessing the correct matches - for you to simply scan and approve or change - and then permanently save.

So, some of it is the app that created the PDF did it wrong,
some of it is the fonts themselves are not configured correctly,
and some if it is the Affinity apps need to do a better job at matching.

If you would like to provide a sample PDF, I can tell you what is happening.

Posted

At the moment I have corrected the offending PDF. I am providing the corrected one  just to see what happens. You are free to keep for your own enjoyment, as I create these things for fellow scholars use at no charge. This is a project that has years of work behind it. I do warn you if you save the documents Publisher will eradicate the thousands of hyper-links that are built into it. As an aside the original file was created in QuarkXpress which has zero problem identifying the fonts in any production. I got rid of Quark sometime ago for a host of reasons and decided to work exclusively with Publisher. My only regret is the destruction of imported hyper-links and some of the font problems. I look forward to the day that Affinity makes the changes needed to make this app a true frontline app to compete with QuarkXpress (which is a nightmare app that I recommend to no one!) and even Adobe Acrobat Pro DC which also in my experience has never failed to ID a font correctly. 

NINETY-SIX SERMONS by Lancelot Andrewes (1841-45) volumes 1-5.pdf

Posted

There is a related issue on Windows I have run into with the Affinity suite several times (although I cannot claim it is "frequent").  Affinity Publisher and Designer (presumably Photo, too, but I haven't made any attempt to check) will sometimes fail to understand that certain long-installed fonts are still installed.  On several occasions, one of a family of fonts is recognized, but none of the others.  And on restart of the application, it sometimes becomes a different single member of a family of fonts which is recognized.  On other occasions, an entire family of fonts is not recognized.

During these episodes, all my other font-aware applications are happily recognizing the complete set of installed fonts, and all the fonts appear in the Windows Fonts folder.  Stopping the Windows Font Cache service, clearing out the cache files, and restarting the WFC does not always clear up the problem.  However, it does reliably go away when the computer is restarted.

Based on this, and my earlier experience with Affinity choking badly on mixed release versions for members of a single font family (see

), there seems to be something rather fragile about the Affinity suite's handling of fonts on Windows.  I would really, really like to know if Affinity has its own list or cache of fonts someplace, so I can try cleaning that out.

Posted

I am sorry that you are having similar problems. I don't feel quite the Lone Ranger as a Mac user. It seems that there really is a significant problem here. I am going to enclose a copy of my file for you. I am curious to see if you see that same thing as I do in the Windows version. Do feel free to keep and use this work as it is a copy of a 17th century document recreated for the 21 First Century user.NINETY-SIX SERMONS by Lancelot Andrewes (1841-45) volumes 1-5.pdf

Posted
1 hour ago, sfriedberg said:

There is a related issue on Windows I have run into with the Affinity suite several times

I should probably add that this occurs most often when I am launching Publisher and Designer and a couple of web browsers all right after logging in.  If I let the system "settle" after login, and launch apps one at a time, I don't recall seeing this issue.  This suggests a race condition of some kind, but that alone would not explain why the problem persists over closing and reopening the Affinity apps.

Posted
2 hours ago, JohnGregory52 said:

At the moment I have corrected the offending PDF. I am providing the corrected one  just to see what happens.

These fonts are good examples of what not to do.
Helvetica, LiberationSerif, and P22MorrisGolden are embedded with sub-optimal names.
Because that is the way they are constructed, so that is how they got embedded.
But APub on Win10 found both Liberation Serif (all 3 styles), and P22 Morris Golden.
I do not have a plain "Helvetica" font installed, so it suggested Arial.
A more intelligent choice would be one of the four Helvetica families I do have installed.
The plain Helvetica family included on the Mac is kind of a mess, so I would not be surprised if that would not be completely correct when importing a doc which has just "Helvetica" as the family name. But even then, it should guess Helvetica regular as the best guess.

So the import went kinda OK.
Do you have some other specific examples where you had issues?

Posted
2 hours ago, sfriedberg said:

Based on this, and my earlier experience with Affinity choking badly on mixed release versions for members of a single font family (see

Your issue may be related to having multiple files in the Fonts folder for the same fonts.
Affinity apps appear to just scan the Fonts folder and cache the font files found.
When there are duplicates, it appears that sometimes nothing will appear at all for those fonts.
And sometimes it just messes-up the font cache and you get bizarre results.

In your other post you are talking about the Noto Serif family of 72 fonts.
And that only 68 appear in the list, meaning four are missing.
This can happen when there are duplicate font files present in the Fonts folder.
LibreOffice installs four fonts from the Noto Serif family.
Sometimes it annoyingly overwrites some of my fonts when I have installed newer versions.
It could also be adding additional files when font files are locked (e.g. by a browser, or app).

So check both the system Fonts folder and your user fonts folder for duplicates.
The duplicates will have a number suffix - such as: NotoSerif-Regular_01.ttf
The only way to get it all straightened-out is to un-install all the fonts in the family,
then delete the duplicate files which remain, and then re-install the fonts.

Other apps that are listing only correctly installed fonts are looking at what is installed according to the Windows registry, not by just scanning the Fonts folder.
In this case they are ignoring the duplicate font files.

So that may be your issue.
If not, we should probably discuss this in your other thread.

Posted

Ran FontDoctor, Typeface and Apple's Font app there are no dupes at all. FontDoctor and Typeface check for dupes regularly and FontDoctor every day. There are no damaged or corrupted fonts either. Deleting the Font cache makes no difference either.

Posted
48 minutes ago, LibreTraining said:

So that may be your issue.
If not, we should probably discuss this in your other thread.

No need.  I diagnosed and fixed that problem. which was a mix of release versions for individual font files, as reported toward the bottom of the other thread.  It's just so annoying that the Affinity suite was the only thing on my system that couldn't deal with it.

Posted
38 minutes ago, JohnGregory52 said:

Ran FontDoctor, Typeface and Apple's Font app there are no dupes at all. FontDoctor and Typeface check for dupes regularly and FontDoctor every day. There are no damaged or corrupted fonts either. Deleting the Font cache makes no difference either.

This is a common issue on Windows, but you are on a Mac, so I do not know how that works.
It may not be an issue, it it may be an issue.
On Windows the Font Manager is only going to show the installed fonts.
Does not show anything about the duplicate files.

Posted
12 minutes ago, sfriedberg said:

No need.  I diagnosed and fixed that problem. which was a mix of release versions for individual font files, as reported toward the bottom of the other thread.  It's just so annoying that the Affinity suite was the only thing on my system that couldn't deal with it.

Looked at those old Noto Serif v1.006 fonts - and the PostScript Name is not the correct format in the regular font.
That has caused issues in other font families in Affinity apps.
The newer versions of Noto Serif have fixed this (v2.x).
So my guess is you getting rid of those four v1.006 fonts mixed with the v2 fonts fixed it.
Noto Serif Display never had this issue, and is probably why you had no problems with it.

 

Posted

Per your observations I have updated the Noto Serif Font to X2. Updated all of the rest of the Noto Fonts too. Thanks for the info.

Posted

May I suggest to one and all that have Macs that you download a copy of Typeface 3.4.1 and see its amazing Font Replacement feature. I am not selling anything!!! I am simply stunned by this and want to share my experience with all of you.

Quote

 

Typeface 3.4 allows you to directly switch fonts in design apps by dragging and dropping fonts. Select some text in your design document and drag a preview from Typeface onto the document.

Typeface handles activation if necessary and changes the font of your selected text. All automated-so you don’t have to struggle with font names anymore

 

This is a huge game changer! It works in all of the Affinity apps and a horde of others.

I would upload a Trial Version but that might not be an approved action. This little app has solved a ton of my font issues.

Posted
5 hours ago, JohnGregory52 said:

I would upload a Trial Version but that might not be an approved action

I am pretty sure that would not be okay. It is more than cool to mention the company though.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.6 
Affinity Designer 2.5.7 | Affinity Photo 2.5.7 | Affinity Publisher 2.5.7 | Beta versions as they appear.

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

Posted
On 11/16/2021 at 6:05 AM, JohnGregory52 said:

I would upload a Trial Version but that might not be an approved action.

No need for uploading a trial version. The link will do fine:

https://typefaceapp.com

I understand a direct link in this case is acceptable, as Typeface is not a competitor to any Serif products but rather a great companion app. Indeed, the developer of Typeface that I have corresponded with on a few occasions has expressed a high regard for Affinity apps and uses them personally as well.

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