sideload font

[schriftgestalt]

I’m a type designer and like to test my fonts in Affinity apps. There is one problem. If you re-install the same font with slight changes in Font Book, the systems font caches are corrupted. For me that means cleaning them and restarting every 10 minutes. Indesign (and all Adobe design apps) have the ability to load fonts from a folder in 'Application Support/Fonts' and from a 'Fonts' folder that is next to the document (the later option makes it much more convenient to work with different people on the same file). As soon as you change the font, Adobe apps will reload it and update the document. 

 

MacOS provides great APIs to activate fonts per app so this is technically possible.  

 

[ctrayne]

I asked about this back in 2015 and didn't get a response.

 

This is the only thing that keeps me from dropping Adobe Illustrator. Unfortunately, I don't think it's going to happen.

[ctrayne]

I would still love to see this feature. Implementing this would allow me to stop using Illustrator and fully switch to Affinity Designer.

[MikeW]

The reason Adobe can do this wonderful thing is due to them bypassing the OS font subsytem. They wrote their own font subsytem. It might be possible for applications that use the OS font subsystem to also load fonts from a non-system font folder. I don't know as other than font managers, I've never seen such an application do it.

CorelDraw does / can do something akin to what Adobe does, but it is not the same. In order to accomplish it, Corel created a font manager and included that code into the core CorelDraw application. As I mentioned, it isn't the same as it still works on entire folders of fonts one adds to the separate font manager. Perhaps this sort of thing could have been written to only point to an application/fonts folder and/or to any specific named font folder under the design files. But it still takes a font manager core to make it work due to the need of temporarily activating the fonts.

[ctrayne]

Thanks for the reply! Sounds like it may not be something I should hold out for (in the near term at least), but I really appreciate your insight. Thanks for looking into it.

[ctrayne]

Small side note: it turns out that RoboFont can do sideloading with Affinity Designer quite well. I just gave it a shot. More info:

https://robofont.com/documentation/how-tos/using-test-install/

 

I typically use Glyphs for all my work, so this doesn't help me a ton, but Affinity handled this method really well and actually updated with the font changes right away (most other apps didn't seem to do so).