Erratic type display

[Nivrams]

I have run into three font frustrations in Affinity Designer:

Characters in a line disappear when the screen is redrawn (resized.) I have to resize again to make the characters reappear only to have others disappear. I have to resize the the art several times until everything is visible.

Another glitch is that I was unable to get AD to display the Zaph Dingbat font, even though it appears in the available font list. It is a permanent system font.

Is there a way to display available glyphs. I am not sure weather Affinity supports Open Type formats, but in the case of dingbat fonts, this would be a convenience… in the event that I can get AD to work with a dingbat font.

[R C-R]

Regarding the Zaph Dingbat font, according to Font Book on my iMac /System/Library/Fonts/ZapfDingbats.ttf includes only 208 glyphs. For some reason the Font Book Repertory (Cmd-2) view only shows 202 of them, one of which (glyph 205) has no Unicode code point or name.

 

However, l have no problems inserting any of the other 201 glyphs into an AD text block, either by dragging its icon from the Font Book Repertory window into the AD text box or inserting it from the OS X Emoji & Symbols character viewer (assuming I know its code point or can find it with a Unicode name search in the viewer).

 

This is obviously not the easiest workflow in the world, but it does show that AD will support the Zaph Dingbat glyphs included in the system font if they have a Unicode code point. So I suggest checking out whatever version of that font you have installed on your Mac with Font Book, & make sure you are trying to insert one of its glyphs into the AD text box. If you try to insert a Unicode character not included in the Zaph Dingbat font, AD will substitute a glyph from another font if it can find one; otherwise it won't insert anything.