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I don't know if I'm just not familiar enough with the affinity suite and haven't found this feature, but there's a feature that I've been wanting for some time. I would like for there to be a tool in affinity designer that streamlines the creation of a new font and allows you to export to a font file format. I want to be able to easily do something like select a letter to work on, design it, and repeat for each letter. Maybe they can add an option to create a "New Font Project..." This would make the font creation process infinitely easier and much more accessible to someone like me who doesn't need to create fonts very often. Every time I want to create a font I'm met with a million steps, and a million potential websites, but never one easy software feature that integrates the design and the workflow into one place. Affinity seems like a prime contender for such a feature, and they already have an amazing base of existing features to work with.

Let me know if anybody else feels something similar, or if you think I'm inept and have to get over it 😆. I just want to be able to keep falling back on affinity for my every design need!

I just found this forum post and I'm hoping that the new release of V2 makes it possible for affinity to add this feature.

 

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3 hours ago, Distill7 said:

You should be looking into font creation software like FontForge or FonLab. It doesn't make any sense to add font functionality into a vector software and I don't know of any that does that.

CorelDraw have (had?) export to ttf, but it was so basic and broken that I don't know anyone who would use it.

People are ridiculous in their demnads. We had video editing, 3d software, website builder, font editor. What next? Torrent client, media player?

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6 hours ago, gabriel_komorov said:

People are ridiculous in their demnads. We had video editing, 3d software, website builder, font editor. What next? Torrent client, media player?

I know this forum is full of ridiculous complaining right now, but just remember that the description for this forum is "Discussions about features that you think will make Affinity even better. ALL suggestions about the software go in this forum."

I'm not demanding, I'm simply an unexperienced wanna-be designer who likes dabbling in software. I just wanted to make a suggestion for a "feature that I thought would make Affinity even better." I figured font design is right up affinity's alley, and really all the feature would entail is just an automated series of uses of existing tools. I think it's an easy add at this point especially for V2.

But I really do appreciate the suggestions guys, like I said I'm not experienced enough to remember all the tools off-hand! I've been looking into them!

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FontCreator (commercial, Windows only)
https://www.high-logic.com/font-editor/fontcreator/

Birdfont (free, open source, Windows, Mac, and Linux)
https://birdfont.org/

Glyphr Studio (free, open source, online)
https://www.glyphrstudio.com/

For a beginner who wants to "dabble" - Birdfont is a good starting point.

FontForge while free, and very powerful, is painful and confusing due to the horrible user interface. Once you learn what you are doing that may be useful. But not a good place to learn.

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54 minutes ago, rawii22 said:

I know this forum is full of ridiculous complaining right now, but just remember that the description for this forum is "Discussions about features that you think will make Affinity even better. ALL suggestions about the software go in this forum."

I'm not demanding, I'm simply an unexperienced wanna-be designer who likes dabbling in software. I just wanted to make a suggestion for a "feature that I thought would make Affinity even better." I figured font design is right up affinity's alley, and really all the feature would entail is just an automated series of uses of existing tools. I think it's an easy add at this point especially for V2.

But I really do appreciate the suggestions guys, like I said I'm not experienced enough to remember all the tools off-hand! I've been looking into them!

Like you, I don’t know the intricacies or technicalities of creating font sets and naturally thought AD might be a good place to start, guess we now know it isn’t 😁

Though I see some font packs include SVG versions, so perhaps if only creating this export type AD might work. Set ruler spacing and make an alphabet.

 

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21 minutes ago, NewInBoston said:

Like you, I don’t know the intricacies or technicalities of creating font sets and naturally thought AD might be a good place to start, guess we now know it isn’t 😁

Though I see some font packs include SVG versions, so perhaps if only creating this export type AD might work. Set ruler spacing and make an alphabet.

Drawing the glyphs is just one part of creating a font. People do use vector drawing applications to create their characters - both plain black and color SVG. You just need some particular settings to be able to import or paste your drawings into a font editor.

See here for one such discussion:

 

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I recommend Glyphs as well, though it'll have the effect of making Affinity Designer's line editing tools seem clunky and inflexible. Much better at deleting nodes and retaining geometry/curvature, and the ability to slide a node without moving the handles is really helpful too.

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Ahem, IF Serif were to add support for third-party extensions, then options such as FontSelf[1] (allows you to create fonts directly in Illustrator and Photoshop) might become available if the developers felt theire was an audience for their products within the Affinity user community. If you're serious about making fonts I would strongly recommend investing it a specialized tool such as Glyphs, Robofont (both are macOS only), or FontLab (available on macOS and Windows).

[1] FontSelf also recently released a version of their font creation software for the iPad.

Note: if you want to install your own fonts on iPadOS/iOS I would highly recommend using Fontcase which makes the process about as easy as it can be given the unfortunate complexity of installing fonts on these devices.

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8 minutes ago, Bryan Rieger said:

Ahem, IF Serif were to add support for third-party extensions,

I love this, I never thought about that, but it's a great point. Affinity would open up their world to so many things if they opened a plugin market.... That might actually be an automatic win to solidify a victory against Adobe... They probably haven't considered it since the company might not be big enough to maintain and moderate such a market yet. They also might be afraid people will start blaming Affinity for mistakes made by other parties, and they cannot afford that right now. There could be a million other things, and Affinity seems like a very shy company on that front right now.

I think the only way they could accept doing such a thing is to tell everyone, "Go wild with extensions, but we're not going to work around them. You have to manage and update them yourself when we release updates."

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51 minutes ago, Bryan Rieger said:

IF Serif were to add support for third-party extensions

They have already indicated they are working on a plugin API which will accompany the scripting support they are working on, but exactly the extent to which those plugins will have access to things and what it will be possible for them to do, we have not yet been told.

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15 hours ago, rawii22 said:

I know this forum is full of ridiculous complaining right now, but just remember that the description for this forum is "Discussions about features that you think will make Affinity even better. ALL suggestions about the software go in this forum."

Sure thing, we should discuss! It wasn't directed at you, just general reaction to recent amounts of bullshit

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6 hours ago, gabriel_komorov said:

Sure thing, we should discuss! It wasn't directed at you, just general reaction to recent amounts of bullshit

Ah, all good! You're sorta right though, there's a place for 3d stuff and web development but probably not in Affinity 😆 (I figure font stuff is a lighter request than all those...)

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There are a lot of font creation or management software.

The two best at the moment seem to be:

6 cœurs, 12 processus - Windows 11 pro - 4K - DirectX 12 - Suite universelle Affinity (Affinity  Publisher, Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo).

Mais je vous le demande, peut-on imaginer une police sans sérifs ?

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If the C API and scripting support is sufficiently good, I'd hope that FontSelf might be interested in porting their product to Affinity, or at least it would be possible to script an easy process for working with font creation programs. 

Creating a professional level font is a very complex undertaking. Even a fairly basic modern font is pretty complicated. Programs like Glyphs or Fontlab are big expensive specialist packages mostly for the relatively small community of professional typeface creators. I get that it is not what the OP was asking for (and the many cheaper options mentioned above, or the Lite versions like Glyphs Mini, include some great options). 

Affinity have already shown that the huge number of functions required for a modern publishing suite is pushing them to their limits, with some fairly basic or obvious features never making it to version 1 (*footnotes*), and I'd much rather that they not put effort into font creation features if they think it is going to be at all difficult and taking resources away from an ambitious publishing suite. But Fontself (or a potential competitor) working with Designer would be great, or a few nice scripts etc that make working with font design programs, and hopefully this will be in the future once scripting and API are here. 

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