liz k Posted November 24, 2022 Share Posted November 24, 2022 I got a new MacBook Pro recently to replace my MacBook Air. I have a project that's going to print soon and I used the font Athelas. In my MacBook Pro, I downloaded the Athelas Font and it's available in other apps, but not Affinity Photo. I checked the details of the font and there's an error showing, saying that it is a duplicated font, but I can't see that it's duplicated. I can't figure out how to add it to Photo. Whenever I open the project in Photo, it says that the font is missing, even though it's in my Font Book on my MacBook. Can anyone help, please? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Old Bruce Posted November 24, 2022 Share Posted November 24, 2022 Just a guess but I think you may have downloaded a Variable font. The Affinity Applications will only use Static (one weight) fonts. Or... it could be the you need to shut down Photo and start it up again. liz k 1 Quote Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 Affinity Designer 2.4.1 | Affinity Photo 2.4.1 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.1 | Beta versions as they appear. I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kenmcd Posted November 25, 2022 Share Posted November 25, 2022 At 17 hours ago, liz k said: I used the font Athelas Athelas is what Apple calls "Document-support fonts" that they have apparently stopped including - so they hide them. See: Fonts included with macOS Monterey https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT212587#document Fonts included with macOS Ventura https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213266#document About half way down the page you will see a heading which says: Document support fonts "These fonts are available only to documents that already use the font, or to apps that request the font by name. Some are older fonts that were included with earlier versions of macOS or Apple apps." There also does appear to be an issue with using these fonts in Affinity applications. Even if they were previously used in the document. Work-arounds: Renaming the fonts has been reported to work. But sometimes if you have a lot of old Affinity docs that may be difficult - as you have to reassign the fonts to all the text. This may be the best option with meeting your deadline. I have seen in another forum that just changing the PostScript Name inside the font may work. This would have the advantage of all current documents probably still working. If you would like to test this option, let me know. lacerto and liz k 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kenmcd Posted November 25, 2022 Share Posted November 25, 2022 Quote or to apps that request the font by name. Have you tried typing the font name in? liz k 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lacerto Posted November 25, 2022 Share Posted November 25, 2022 I tested this on macOS Ventura on an M1 mac using VectorStyler and Photoshop (CC 2023) and both seem to include these hidden fonts (e.g. Seravek with all 10 sub styles, or Athelas with four sub styles) in font lists and they operate correctly also when exported: hiddenfonts.pdf On the other hand, Apple's own Pages does not expose these fonts, nor are they shown in Font Book. Office apps and LibreOffice do not show them, either. I remember to have read that these fonts are often also somehow crippled (e.g., Seravek seems to have very inadequate kerning pairs, which is hard to believe for such high-quality font). If I copy paste text laid out in one of these missing fonts from an app exposing them, the fonts will be replaced with Lucida Grande, as they will be when trying to open a PDF document having these fonts embedded. They are correctly passed through, though. When copy pasted, the font names are not shown with a question mark (indicating a missing font), but in Font Manager these fonts are shown as missing, and they are rendered with fallback fonts so it does not seem they can be tricked to be used within Affinity apps. Since Photoshop lists these fonts, it does not seem that including these hidden fonts is against any license agreements and hacked to become available, though I once remember to have read that these fonts are deliberately made available only to certain apps (but why would not Pages be one of them?). But I am sure that VectorStyler is not one of those selected few so perhaps availability is just a question of whether an app bothers to enumerate known hidden fonts. liz k 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lacerto Posted November 25, 2022 Share Posted November 25, 2022 liz k 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
liz k Posted November 25, 2022 Author Share Posted November 25, 2022 10 hours ago, Old Bruce said: Just a guess but I think you may have downloaded a Variable font. The Affinity Applications will only use Static (one weight) fonts. Or... it could be the you need to shut down Photo and start it up again. Thanks for replying. I tried that but it didn't work Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
liz k Posted November 25, 2022 Author Share Posted November 25, 2022 6 hours ago, kenmcd said: At Athelas is what Apple calls "Document-support fonts" that they have apparently stopped including - so they hide them. See: Fonts included with macOS Monterey https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT212587#document Fonts included with macOS Ventura https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213266#document About half way down the page you will see a heading which says: Document support fonts "These fonts are available only to documents that already use the font, or to apps that request the font by name. Some are older fonts that were included with earlier versions of macOS or Apple apps." There also does appear to be an issue with using these fonts in Affinity applications. Even if they were previously used in the document. Work-arounds: Renaming the fonts has been reported to work. But sometimes if you have a lot of old Affinity docs that may be difficult - as you have to reassign the fonts to all the text. This may be the best option with meeting your deadline. I have seen in another forum that just changing the PostScript Name inside the font may work. This would have the advantage of all current documents probably still working. If you would like to test this option, let me know. Thanks for your reply. Yeah, the Athelas font is available in other apps—although they are Mac apps (pages, Keynote). I'm not sure how to change PostScript Name, so I think I will end up changing the font. Big sigh. Got over 50 documents! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
liz k Posted November 25, 2022 Author Share Posted November 25, 2022 5 hours ago, kenmcd said: Have you tried typing the font name in? Thanks for your reply. I just tried that, but it doesn't work Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
liz k Posted November 28, 2022 Author Share Posted November 28, 2022 On 11/25/2022 at 4:55 AM, lacerto said: I tested this on macOS Ventura on an M1 mac using VectorStyler and Photoshop (CC 2023) and both seem to include these hidden fonts (e.g. Seravek with all 10 sub styles, or Athelas with four sub styles) in font lists and they operate correctly also when exported: hiddenfonts.pdf 645.12 kB · 1 download On the other hand, Apple's own Pages does not expose these fonts, nor are they shown in Font Book. Office apps and LibreOffice do not show them, either. I remember to have read that these fonts are often also somehow crippled (e.g., Seravek seems to have very inadequate kerning pairs, which is hard to believe for such high-quality font). If I copy paste text laid out in one of these missing fonts from an app exposing them, the fonts will be replaced with Lucida Grande, as they will be when trying to open a PDF document having these fonts embedded. They are correctly passed through, though. When copy pasted, the font names are not shown with a question mark (indicating a missing font), but in Font Manager these fonts are shown as missing, and they are rendered with fallback fonts so it does not seem they can be tricked to be used within Affinity apps. Since Photoshop lists these fonts, it does not seem that including these hidden fonts is against any license agreements and hacked to become available, though I once remember to have read that these fonts are deliberately made available only to certain apps (but why would not Pages be one of them?). But I am sure that VectorStyler is not one of those selected few so perhaps availability is just a question of whether an app bothers to enumerate known hidden fonts. Thanks for your reply. I see what you're saying. I've realised that updating my MacBook to Ventura is the reason these fonts have disappeared. I still have my other MacBook, so can use that when working on the files with Athelas. What a pain, though! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lacerto Posted November 28, 2022 Share Posted November 28, 2022 3 hours ago, liz k said: Thanks for your reply. I see what you're saying. I've realised that updating my MacBook to Ventura is the reason these fonts have disappeared. I still have my other MacBook, so can use that when working on the files with Athelas. What a pain, though! Yes, these fonts are installed but hidden and this makes it impossible to install on the same system e.g. Athelas font family from Adobe Fonts (or other sources), as they would be considered as duplicates. The fonts can be copied from the system library to a user specific library and could "in principle" be installed from there as generally available fonts, but the problem is that the existing hidden installation of these fonts should first be removed (it seems that Font Book does not allow overriding an existing installation), and probably also the actual font files (or font collection file), too. So in practice it seems that the alternative copies should be renamed before they can be installed for general use on Ventura and other systems where these fonts are no longer publicly available. It really is quite a nuisance and I think Apple should initially have named these fonts so that they do not prevent installation of the non-Apple versions of the same fonts from other, fully legal sources. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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