Affinity Designer cannot render the latest SF Pro fonts correctly, on Both V1 and V2

[Mic Sun]

The spaces between 2 letters don't change (video below) with the latest SF fonts.

But these fonts works well in Figma and iWork.

[Floor]

That's related to variable font support. SFPro is a variable font and Affinity doesn't support those. The information in the font that determines the spacing between the glyphs is not applied correctly.

 

[Hangman]

5 hours ago, Floor said:

That's related to variable font support. SFPro is a variable font and Affinity doesn't support those.

I don't believe that is the case since all weights are downloaded not just a single variable font. Apple Pages which also doesn't support variable fonts displays SF Pro correctly which is why I don't believe this is the issue here...

Edit: Just realised I was referencing SF Pro Text and not SF Pro

[Floor]

2 hours ago, Hangman said:

I don't believe that is the case since all weights are downloaded not just a single variable font. Apple Pages which also doesn't support variable fonts displays SF Pro correctly which is why I don't believe this is the issue here...

The current official download from Apple provides SF Pro as a variable font. Affinity does display the named instances of this variable font in the font variant dropdown, but that still is a single font file.

Apple uses CoreText for font rendering, which does support variable fonts. You may not be able to manually tweak the parameters of a variable font in Pages, but it does render correctly because the underlying text layout engine knows about variable fonts and applies the correct glyph spacing for each named instance.

As far as I'm aware Affinity uses a custom text layout engine, which apparently does not apply the correct font properties of variable fonts.

[kenmcd]

3 minutes ago, Floor said:

Affinity does display the named instances of this variable font in the font variant dropdown, but that still is a single font file.

On the Mac Affinity applications use the macOS font picker, and that picker list does support variable fonts so it displays them - even though the application does not support variable fonts. Which is obviously confusing to users. On Windows the font picker displays the default master which according to OpenType specs is what is supposed to happen. Both methods are not ideal. Users should be told the variable font is not supported.