Affinity Publisher placement results in missing Google Fonts and crazy formatting

[Ryan Clarke]

It seems that using anything other than Microsoft Word is a penalty I keep on paying for in Affinity Publisher V2. I have spent all morning trying to import a Pages document in by exporting it as a word document. When I finally got it to work, it imported all of my Paragraph and text styles but has ignored all of the fonts.

The body text is Lora but shows up as "?LoraRegular Regular" in Affinity.

I'm using Google's Noto Sans Display for all my headers. They also show up in Affinity Designer with '?' next to them despite the fonts being loaded on my system. What makes it worse is that Affinity doesn't tell me what font it has substitued for nor are there any alerts that say the fonts were missing.

I am having to reselect and adjust every paragraph style using the Text Styles panel. This in turn causes massive slow downs on my system with the spinning wheel of death on my M1 Mac as I try to select the correct font. Something that never happens with any other V2 Affinity products. Admittedly, Noto Sans has about 20 or more different variants but I use Designer all the time to format text with no slow downs.

Even when I do finally get to select the right font, the formatting is crazy and I can find no way of fixing it. This is how the text is formatted  in the Word converted document:

And this is how the text is formatted inside Affinity Publisher.

 

 

As you can see the header text tracking is all over the place. I tried adjusting it but looks as if it is has some kind of even justification that I cannot remove.

Here are the style settings as they appear in the Text Style panel for the Bold header:

Font: Noto Sans Display; Font weight: Normal; Italic: Off; Font width: Normal; Font size: 14 pt; Baseline advance: 0 pt; Default kern: on; Kern: 7 ‰; Scale X: 100 %; Underline: None; Strikethrough: None; No superscript/subscript; Spelling language: English (United States); Character fill: R:57 G:57 B:58; Align paragraph: Left; Leading mode: % ideal; Start: Anywhere; Keep with next: 1; Prevent widows: On; Prevent orphans: On; Auto hyphenation: Off; Leading: 80 %; Left indent: 0 mm; Right indent: 0 mm; First line indent: 5 mm; Space before: 0 pt; Space after: 0 pt; Paragraph decorations

[Oufti]

1 hour ago, Ryan Clarke said:

it imported all of my Paragraph and text styles but has ignored all of the fonts.

Could it be that these fonts are variable fonts? Affinity does not support variable fonts and requires that you install the static variants for this font. 

[Ryan Clarke]

Sorry I have no idea what that means.

[R C-R]

6 hours ago, Ryan Clarke said:

Sorry I have no idea what that means.

Just do a web search on "variable fonts" if you do not know what they are. For instance, one of the hits will be https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/introducing_type/introducing_variable_fonts, which explains how they differ from regular fonts.

[Oufti]

These articles could enlighten you better than I could about the difference between static fonts (with different files for italic, bold, extrabold,…) and variable fonts (a single file with variable axis giving access to different variations of letters):

• https://www.browserstack.com/guide/variable-fonts-vs-static-fonts#:~:text=Static Fonts maintain a different,support CSS transition and animation. 

• https://fonts.google.com/knowledge/introducing_type/introducing_variable_fonts

Noto is possibly disponible as static fonts (but I couldn't find it…): 
https://fonts.google.com/noto
Unfortunately, Lora is not: 
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Lora

Perhaps could you consider using other fonts if you want to work with Affinity?

 

 

[kenmcd]

Noto Sans Display static fonts are available here (in the old repo):
https://github.com/notofonts/noto-fonts/tree/main/hinted/ttf/NotoSansDisplay 
and here: Noto_Sans_Display.(2022-06-30).zip 
Note: this repo/zip has all  four static widths.

Lora full release with static fonts (OTF+TTF) is available here:
https://github.com/cyrealtype/Lora-Cyrillic/releases/tag/v3.005  
and here:  Lora-v3.005.(2023-01-16).release.zip

On 3/4/2024 at 8:37 AM, Ryan Clarke said:

The body text is Lora but shows up as "?LoraRegular Regular" in Affinity.

Sure sign of a variable font (one that may not be configured properly).

[Ryan Clarke]

Nice. Thanks for the links.

This may be a redundant question, but is there no way of taking a variable font and turning it into a static font via third party software? It's a shame that Affinity Publisher aims itself at a marketplace that forces the user to have to pay for fonts, rather than be able to use Google Free fonts.

I had to pay for Microsoft Word today. So my £60 purchase of Affinity Publisher has now cost me £126. It would cost me potentially thousands more for a decent set of fonts for commercial publication.