Variable fonts support

[edwardsson]

2 hours ago, DR34MER said:

Like most here, I agree. +1 vote from me. I’ve seen so many variable fonts I want to buy licensing for but thankfully I checked if Affinity supports them or not before proceeding with the purchase. Variable font support needs to be there on both desktop and mobile platforms. It’s not like it’s an unavailable tool that I can find workarounds for. The use of these fonts can help in making our careers. For example, I find it quite unfortunate that I can’t use this beautiful variable font in any of my projects:

https://www.nikolastype.com/fonts/solare/

Beautiful font. Hope we'll get support for the variable fonts as soon as possible.

[Viktor CR]

This functionality is becoming increasingly important for brand consistency.
Some on the web widely used Google Font variants with original, classic style are only accessible as variable fonts.

[dloewen4]

Please add this feature. Tried to use a variable font today and was surprised it's not possible to change the weight :(

[Thomas Phinney]

On 9/7/2023 at 7:40 PM, Bobby Henderson said:

I never heard the story before of Microsoft convincing Adobe to drop the T1 MM format in order to get "Works With Windows" labels put on retail packages. I had Windows versions of Illustrator in the late 1990's that could use T1 MM fonts.

You haven’t heard the story before, because it is absolutely untrue.

First, Adobe stopped making new fonts in Type 1 format very early in their switch to OpenType. Before they even shipped their first retail OpenType fonts in the year 2000. That included Type 1 MM fonts.

Originally Adobe intended to have and ship OpenType Multiple Master fonts among their first OpenType fonts. The format was fully spec’d and fonts were being developed. Dan Mills at Adobe decided to drop the MM part for two reasons:

1) Microsoft had zero interest in MM OpenType at the time, and was proving a reluctant partner on that part of things. But that was not the same as pressure, and there was no quid pro quo that I ever heard at the time.

2) OpenType layout features and the rest of it was a hard enough sell without the MM part at the same time. Dan was concerned OpenType might not succeed if MM was bundled in there from the beginning.

Some of us at Adobe were pretty unhappy when Dan told us (the type team) of his decision (in 1999 IIRC?). David Lemon and I talked about it at great length. But as much as we loved MM (and love variable fonts now) we were not convinced he was wrong. I believe I recall saying exactly that to David, and him agreeing, before we even left the room. I remember David Lemon and I talking about how maybe some day we could bring back MM in OpenType. It took 17 years, but it happened at ATypI in Warsaw in 2016. And that time around, Adobe (David), Microsoft (Greg), Apple (Ned) and Google (Behdad) all did it as a joint announcement—although Apple was coy about committing to support for the new stuff, as it was based fairly directly on the GX Variations tech, it seemed pretty clear they were down for it.

[Thomas Phinney]

So, lots of pressure here on Affinity to do this. I just want to comment a bit on something. And please note, this is from the perspective that I personally love variable fonts, have made a bunch of them, and can’t imagine personally paying to license any general design tool today that does not support them decently.

Variable font support is NOT trivial

It isn’t just a matter of enabling something. And no, switching out their back-end font engine for Harfbuzz would not be trivial, and even if it were, that would not solve the problem! Don’t get me wrong, either supporting Harfbuzz or supporting variable fonts in their own engine is a huge amount of work. So many assumptions need to be thrown away, in either case. APIs reworked... agh.

But the other huge deal is: user interface aspects of variable fonts are a huge hassle. The names and contents of axes are completely arbitrary and not known in advance by app developers. What is the most axes a font can have? 64K. Maybe the app has some arbitrary limit lower than that. How fine should the stops be on an axis? How many predefined instances should they support per axis? How do they expose predefined instances for variable fonts and how do they make those interact with user-defined instances? Do they just use sliders for everything? Do they support decimals in axis positions or only whole numbers? Manual input of position coordinates, or only the sliders? And on and on.

Without going into the same detail, impacts on layout are similarly huge.

 

Writing this as former fonts product manager at Adobe (until December 2008), later product management for font management and web fonts at Extensis, and CEO of FontLab

Anyway, I am eager to see this support in Serif’s Affinity products, but please understand it is a heck of a lot of work!

(Is that enough italics and boldface for one post, or should I throw in some more gratuitously here?)

[DR34MER]

5 hours ago, Thomas Phinney said:

Variable font support is NOT trivial

 I get that, Thomas. Even the simplest things are often significantly more complex than we think. Honestly, I’d rather see R&D budget prioritized for something important that has no workarounds like variable fonts instead of it going to on a tool like vector tracing that we can workaround doing by hand.

[AffinityMakesMeWonder]

7 hours ago, Thomas Phinney said:

So, lots of pressure here on Affinity to do this. I just want to comment a bit on something. And please note, this is from the perspective that I personally love variable fonts, have made a bunch of them, and can’t imagine personally paying to license any general design tool today that does not support them decently.

Variable font support is NOT trivial

It isn’t just a matter of enabling something. And no, switching out their back-end font engine for Harfbuzz would not be trivial, and even if it were, that would not solve the problem! Don’t get me wrong, either supporting Harfbuzz or supporting variable fonts in their own engine is a huge amount of work. So many assumptions need to be thrown away, in either case. APIs reworked... agh.

But the other huge deal is: user interface aspects of variable fonts are a huge hassle. The names and contents of axes are completely arbitrary and not known in advance by app developers. What is the most axes a font can have? 64K. Maybe the app has some arbitrary limit lower than that. How fine should the stops be on an axis? How many predefined instances should they support per axis? How do they expose predefined instances for variable fonts and how do they make those interact with user-defined instances? Do they just use sliders for everything? Do they support decimals in axis positions or only whole numbers? Manual input of position coordinates, or only the sliders? And on and on.

Without going into the same detail, impacts on layout are similarly huge.

 

Writing this as former fonts product manager at Adobe (until December 2008), later product management for font management and web fonts at Extensis, and CEO of FontLab

Anyway, I am eager to see this support in Serif’s Affinity products, but please understand it is a heck of a lot of work!

(Is that enough italics and boldface for one post, or should I throw in some more gratuitously here?)

Thomas, if you have had such good jobs earlier, you may not be the poorest guy in here - what I mean with that is the question: why do you use such a cheap software suite like Affinity when you can sub on Adobe CC and get all your needs fulfilled?

For me Affinity Suite is really great, and I run it on both iPad Pro, Mac and Windows 11 - it satisfied my needs well so far…

[PaoloT]

3 hours ago, AffinityMakesMeSmile said:

why do you use such a cheap software suite like Affinity when you can sub on Adobe CC and get all your needs fulfilled?

I would bet Thomas is not exactly a user, but a technician and entrepreneur in an industrial sector where Affinity is one of the main contenders…

Paolo

 

[fde101]

3 hours ago, AffinityMakesMeSmile said:

why do you use such a cheap software suite like Affinity when you can sub on Adobe CC and get all your needs fulfilled?

The price itself is not as important as the pricing model.  CC is a subscription-only offering, and for me, that means it is a dead product.  Even if it were a penny a month it would be too much.  If the Affinity suite cost three times as much as it does it would still be an offering to consider as it is perpetually licensed.

[Ryan Clarke]

On 3/6/2024 at 11:38 AM, AffinityMakesMeSmile said:

Thomas, if you have had such good jobs earlier, you may not be the poorest guy in here - what I mean with that is the question: why do you use such a cheap software suite like Affinity when you can sub on Adobe CC and get all your needs fulfilled?

For me Affinity Suite is really great, and I run it on both iPad Pro, Mac and Windows 11 - it satisfied my needs well so far…

Do you even consider the fact that some people choose not to use Adobe out of PRINCIPLE? I can afford to use Adobe products, but I despise the companies practises. I also don't want software that crashes every ten minutes like Photoshop and Premiere. However, I am really miffed to have bought the whole Affinity suite to find out that I cannot use variable fonts.

It's a bit rich to promote a product so heavily as an affordable alternative, when you would need to outlay thousands of pounds to equip yourself with fonts in Affinity that you can get for free from Google.

Furthermore, learning any piece of software is an investment in itself. A huge investment. Do I really have to go and spend weeks learning how to use InDesign now, and putting up with all the errors and crashing because Affinity is only interested in the amateur marketplace?

4 years of complaining and not a peep out of the developers. Shame on you.

 

 

[PaulEC]

10 minutes ago, Ryan Clarke said:

It's a bit rich to promote a product so heavily as an affordable alternative, when you would need to outlay thousands of pounds to equip yourself with fonts in Affinity that you can get for free from Google

There are plenty of free fonts (not variable) from Google Fonts, and elsewhere, you don’t need to spend lots of money!

[fde101]

31 minutes ago, Ryan Clarke said:

It's a bit rich to promote a product so heavily as an affordable alternative, when you would need to outlay thousands of pounds to equip yourself with fonts in Affinity that you can get for free from Google.

QuarkXPress comes in at a significantly higher price point than the entire Affinity suite, and they do not seem to fully support variable fonts yet either (though they have said it is on the roadmap for several years now).

[Bryan Rieger]

6 hours ago, Ryan Clarke said:

…I am really miffed to have bought the whole Affinity suite to find out that I cannot use variable fonts.

It's a bit rich to promote a product so heavily as an affordable alternative, when you would need to outlay thousands of pounds to equip yourself with fonts in Affinity that you can get for free from Google.

While we continue to wait for any sign of variable fonts in the Affinity apps from Serif, tools such as https://slice-gui.netlify.app/docs/ can be used to work around the problem (yes, another work-around) by creating static versions of variable fonts that can then be used in the Affinity apps.

Annoying, time-consuming, and far from ideal, but if needs must, it’s an option.

[Bobby Henderson]

On 3/6/2024 at 5:38 AM, AffinityMakesMeSmile said:

Thomas, if you have had such good jobs earlier, you may not be the poorest guy in here - what I mean with that is the question: why do you use such a cheap software suite like Affinity when you can sub on Adobe CC and get all your needs fulfilled?

Some of us need to use multiple applications in our daily work. I currently have copies of Affinity Designer, Inkscape, CorelDRAW and Adobe Illustrator installed on my computer. One of the biggest reasons is being able to handle customer provided art files accurately. None of these applications have 100% feature overlap or 100% compatibility with each other. It's usually a lot easier to open an art file in its native environment than wasting time fighting with it in a rival application. Some of these applications have their own unique features as well as their own strengths and weaknesses. CorelDRAW has long been popular in the sign industry; although Illustrator has eaten into that lead via its strengths in large format digital printing. The branding work of most major companies is done using Adobe software. So we get a lot of AI and PDF files as art assets. I decided to check out Affinity Designer when Serif was having its 50% off covid pricing sale a couple years ago. I figured it might be good to have the app handy in case I started getting .afdesign files from clients. Lately though, uh, it seems like more and more client art is being generated in Canva. That's just creating more hurdles and wasted time dealing with customer provided art.

[DR34MER]

On 3/8/2024 at 11:04 PM, PaulEC said:

There are plenty of free fonts (not variable) from Google Fonts, and elsewhere, you don’t need to spend lots of money!

if Google Fonts can provide me with a typeface like this, your statement would have value.

https://www.nikolastype.com/fonts/solare/

[walt.farrell]

5 minutes ago, DR34MER said:

if Google Fonts can provide me with a typeface like this, your statement would have value.

https://www.nikolastype.com/fonts/solare/

Paul was responding to another user's comment that seemed to say that Google Fonts provides only Variable fonts. That statement is false, and thus Paul's statement has value, even if it doesn't apply to you.

In any case, Nikolas Type also provides the static versions of Solare, if that's really the font you want to use. So you wouldn't need to use Google Fonts for that one.

[PaulEC]

16 minutes ago, DR34MER said:

if Google Fonts can provide me with a typeface like this, your statement would have value.

https://www.nikolastype.com/fonts/solare/

This has nothing to do with my reply nor the post I was replying to!

[DR34MER]

2 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

In any case, Nikolas Type also provides the static versions of Solare, if that's really the font you want to use. So you wouldn't need to use Google Fonts for that one.

That’s great advice…assuming I want to buy and license a single family from the typeface with predetermined weights and intensity. Then, you’re ignoring the strength and the whole point of variable fonts. The variable bundle that includes everything is 199€ in total, whereas the 3 families cost 119€ each and totaling to 357€. I don’t know about you, but I don’t wanna pay 375€-(the valuable variable font benefits) instead of 199€+(the valuable variable font benefits)

[walt.farrell]

18 minutes ago, DR34MER said:

The variable bundle that includes everything is 199€ in total, whereas the 3 families cost 119€ each and totaling to 357€. I don’t know about you, but I don’t wanna pay 375€-(the valuable variable font benefits) instead of 199€+(the valuable variable font benefits)

The variable bundle includes the static fonts, from what I have read on that site:

 

[kenmcd]

Ahhh... another troll to join ranks with the CityRodent.

[Stepaan]

On 3/6/2024 at 12:38 PM, AffinityMakesMeSmile said:

Thomas, if you have had such good jobs earlier, you may not be the poorest guy in here - what I mean with that is the question: why do you use such a cheap software suite like Affinity when you can sub on Adobe CC and get all your needs fulfilled?

For me Affinity Suite is really great, and I run it on both iPad Pro, Mac and Windows 11 - it satisfied my needs well so far…

For me, the price or boycotting Adobe isn't the issue. I simply love working in Affinity Suite, and whenever I can, I start new business using Affinity. Just because its very pleasant workflow... But lack of the Variable Font support becomes a problem increasingly since many clients use them in their designs.

[Affinityconfusesme]

Something tells me we will get this in 2.5. Based on a commend from Lee D last year.

 

[Alfred]

41 minutes ago, tzvi20 said:

Something tells me we will get this in 2.5.

Support for variable fonts is completely different from CJK text handling.

[Luca2024]

Hi guys, unfortunately I have some previous AI files with variable fonts with I CAN'T TOUCH (doesn't worth to change) and I was surprise that is still missing. I can't move forward to the Affinity adoption and I must stick to Ilustrator for now although I spend money for affinity suite. I prefer PARK the Affinity designer adoption for now. I am disappointed.

Despite the variable fonts, other parts of the same AI file (exported in CC-legacy) is not read consistently by affinity designer.

Edited March 22 by Luca2024

[Alfred]

34 minutes ago, Luca2024 said:

other parts of the same AI file (exported in CC-legacy) is not read consistently by affinity designer

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, @Luca2024.

When you say “not read consistently”, I hope you’re not saying that the same AI file looks different each time you open it! I presume you mean that some AI files opened in AD don’t look the same as they do when opened in AI, but this is to be expected. The Affinity apps are unable to read the proprietary file format used by AI, depending instead on the contents of the PDF stream which is included when the document is saved from AI as a PDF-compatible file: some elements may be missing from that PDF stream, making them unavailable to other apps.