Times New Roman problem

[Kalvos]

Hi all,

 

Windows 10 font issue only witn Affinity Publisher.

I brought in a large text file that uses Times New Roman extended characters. Affinity Publisher changes the font to Times New Roman PSMT. It will not change to Times New Roman regular, and so the extended characters are not showing up. There is no option for another font in the font manager.

I uninstalled Times New Roman PSMT, restarted the computer, and Affinity Publisher now shows Times New Roman regular as some entirely different font (in this case, a music font called Most). It displays bold, italic, and bold italic, but NOT regular.

I need the extended characters and so need the 'real' Times New Roman to do that, not PSMT, which is an incomplete font. Images showing the text in the document (bold showing correctly) and the drop-down font list. (Times New Roman regular shows  up correctly in MS Word, OpenOffice, etc., and in the Windows font list.)

Can anyone help with this?

Thank you!

 

 

 

 

Edited August 15, 2022 by Kalvos
Helpful piece of info left out.

[iconoclast]

Hi Kalvos!

 

I'm no sure, but it seems to be a Windows-related problem. Take a look at this.

[kenmcd]

1 hour ago, Kalvos said:

I uninstalled Times New Roman PSMT

The only font I am aware of which is named this (TimesNewRomanPSMT) is a very old font floating around out in the ether which appears to be a conversion from an old PostScript Type 1 font. This font only has 233 characters - like many old Type 1 conversions where fonts could only have 256 characters - so I am not sure of what "extended characters" you are looking for.

In the current Times New Roman Regular (OpenType-TT) font the PostScript Name inside the font, which is used when the font is embedded in a PDF, is "TimesNewRomanPSMT" (apparently an old legacy name for compatibility).
This name is the same as all the name fields in the old conversion font above.
So you have duplicate font names installed.

Duplicate font names are going to confuse applications, and mess-up your font caches (operating system, and Affinity applications, etc.) - which is why you now see corrupt previews in the font list.

I would suggest re-starting your computer, but since that apparently did not work, you may have to manually clear your font cache.

Delete the TimesNewRomanPSMT font file and never install it again.
There is nothing in that font which is not in the current TNR.

 

[Kalvos]

Thank you for the suggestion.

I had already deleted the old font file, which caused the original problem of not having special characters in the extended area (schwa, inverted R, etc.).

I followed the instructions for deleting the cache, restarting, etc. The cache folder was empty and I rebooted. Affinity still does not find Times New Roman regular -- only bold, italic, and bold italic. Those fonts do have the extended characters, by the way.

What's especially difficult for me at this point is that the phonetic material was near the end of the document and I didn't discover the font failure until I reached that area in layout. Now that the PSMT file is gone, I can't recover the document layout at all (no other font has close enough metrics to TNR).

Does Affinity itself have a font cache? I found the fonts.xml file, but it only has recent font names. And as I said, this is not a problem with any other application (Word, OpenOffice, Finale, Foxit PDF, Paint Shop Pro, Vegas Video, etc.).

The project is due Friday so I still have time to figure this out without redoing the entire layout with a new font.

Thanks again,

Dennis

 

 

 

[lacerto]

You could try if holding down Alt + Ctrl when launching Publisher and then choosing "Reset Font Replacements" helps to get Times New Roman Regular not mapped to anything else:

[Kalvos]

Thanks for the suggestion, and I did so. No change. I then did it again, re-setting everything on the panel. No change.

The closest other font with roughly the same metrics as Times New Roman and that has the extended character set is Tahoma -- but it has no italics.

So for now, I've started the project over in InDesign, which sees all the variants of Times New Roman and displays the extended characters.. 

 

Edited August 16, 2022 by Kalvos
misspelling

[lacerto]

An interesting problem. Could you post any short text passage having those extended characters in Times New Roman Regular as Publisher, InDesign (or IDML) document, and as exported PDF?

[MikeW]

Other than the Windows font cache being confused, I would try uninstalling the music font and rebooting. Then see if TNR regular shows up properly. 

[iconoclast]

I'm not an expert in these things and don't really understand the context, but as I read somewhere "Times New Roman PSMT" is the postscript name of the True Type Font Times New Roman, that needs to be converted to Postscript for printing. Don't know if this helps somehow. I'm not even sure that it is true.

Can't you solve the problem by converting the text to curves before you export the document as PDF? It will of course no longer be editable text. But possibly it doesn't need to be editable anymore?

[iconoclast]

1 hour ago, MikeW said:

Other than the Windows font cache being confused, I would try uninstalling the music font and rebooting. Then see if TNR regular shows up properly. 

I think in that case the Times will be substituted by another font. Don't think it will help.

[Dan C]

Hi @Kalvos,

Welcome to the Affinity Forums

Sorry to see you're having trouble!

Can you please confirm for me, have you reset the font cache for both Windows and the Affinity app separately?

[Kalvos]

31 minutes ago, Dan C said:

Can you please confirm for me, have you reset the font cache for both Windows and the Affinity app separately?

Yes, as described above, I've cleared the Windows font cache and cleared all the Affinity options (Ctl+Alt to launch). If there's another Affinity cache to clear, please let me know where to find it.

[Kalvos]

7 hours ago, lacerto said:

An interesting problem. Could you post any short text passage having those extended characters in Times New Roman Regular as Publisher, InDesign (or IDML) document, and as exported PDF?

Since I've shifted back to InDesign and have a deadline, I'll post those as soon as I can.

To be clear, it's not the extended characters per se that are the problem; they're part of Times New Roman v7.00, which is installed on this Windows 10 machine. The characters were not available in Times New Roman PSMT, so they didn't show up in Publisher, which only allowed TNR/PSMT for regular text. Once I'd uninstalled TNR/PSMT, Publisher subsituted a different font. As you can see in my OP, it doesn't see TNR at all now. The entire document has a random font replacing TNR Regular (but not TNR bold, italic, or bold italic). This is the case for any new document--there's no TNR Regular available to Publisher.

As mentioned in the previous post to Dan C, I've done the whole Windows cache reset/rebuild and cleared all the Publisher options and reboot.

[lacerto]

3 hours ago, Kalvos said:

Since I've shifted back to InDesign and have a deadline, I'll post those as soon as I can.

Ok, fine. I have version 7.01 (Win 11) installed and that works fine with Affinity apps, but I do not think that the minor version update makes any difference. It would be interesting to know what causes this error. It sounds like something caused by a name conflict but as you have already removed the most obvious conflicting font and still cannot access TNR Regular from within Publisher, it may be that there is another font still confusing Affinity apps (other apps may be cleverer in resolving name conflicts). 

[kenmcd]

@Kalvos

Metrics compatible with Times New Roman: (1) Tinos (get from Google Fonts), (2) Liberation Serif (comes with LibreOffice and updated version available on GitHub).

STIX Two Text is a high-quality substitute, but not exactly the same metrics. (Available on GitHub)

Re: TNR-Regular still an issue - some old or specialty fonts used the old cross-core TNR font as their starting point. And I have seen some of these fonts where most of the name fields inside the font still say TNR and this causes name conflicts like what you still have. So check other fonts thoroughly.

[Kalvos]

1 hour ago, LibreTraining said:

@Kalvos

Re: TNR-Regular still an issue - some old or specialty fonts used the old cross-core TNR font as their starting point. And I have seen some of these fonts where most of the name fields inside the font still say TNR and this causes name conflicts like what you still have. So check other fonts thoroughly.

That was it. Most was what Affinity was substituting. I opened it in High-Logic Font Creator (which I use for developing fonts) and sure enough, its Postscript name was Times New Roman PSMT. I changes it PS name to "MostSerif" (its filename) and the correct TNR popped up in Affinity.

Thanks to everone

[Dan C]

On 8/16/2022 at 1:59 PM, Kalvos said:

Yes, as described above, I've cleared the Windows font cache and cleared all the Affinity options (Ctl+Alt to launch). If there's another Affinity cache to clear, please let me know where to find it.

Thanks for confirming that for me and my apologies for the delayed response here!

The options you've used should have cleared the Affinity cache - but I'd like to try a little more of an aggressive option to ensure all of these caches are rebuilt.

Can you please make sure Publisher is closed, then open Windows Run (Windows Key + R) then paste the following string and press OK:

%APPDATA%\Affinity\Publisher

In the window that opens, please select the 1.0 folder and rename this to 1.0(old). Now, relaunch Affinity Publisher and this will re-create the 1.0 folder, with complete default settings.

If this doesn't change the behaviour within Publisher, are you able to provide an .afpub file which shows this issue?

Can you also please confirm for me, did you originally install this font within the Windows Fonts folder or within the Fonts folder in AppData? (the Windows Fonts folder installs for all users, but the App Data installation is user specific)

Many thanks once again

[Kalvos]

6 minutes ago, Dan C said:

Thanks for confirming that for me and my apologies for the delayed response here!

 

Hi Dan,

This was solved above. Since Affinity substituted the Most Serif font, I went looking for it. I didn't want to delete it because I use it regularly. It turns out that it was identifying itself in its PostScript name as TimesNewRomanPSMT. I'm guessing that Affinity goes in alphabetical order when loading fonts? In any case, I opened it in a font editor and changed the PostScript name to MostSerif, and then all was well. Other programs seem to behave differently in loading fonts, perhaps ignoring the PostScript name? I don't know.

For now, this is fixed. If it comes up again, I'll try clearing via the AppData.

Thanks very much!