Affinity Suite: Font managers

[Pyanepsion]

Hi, everybody

Context

When importing a Word document into Affinity Publisher, containing several footnotes written in various writing systems, I used the Bodoni MT font for the footnote style, in its regular, bold and italic variants.

However, the Font Manager reported a character incompatibility with Bodoni MT Regular, while the Bodoni MT Italic and Bodoni MT Bold styles posed no problems.

Observed behavior

Here’s the path that explains the difficulties encountered.

When I clicked on the Locate button to identify incompatible typefaces, the tool directed me straight to the first footnote. Yet this footnote seemed to contain only Bodoni MT Regular text. Suspecting the presence of an invisible character or some other anomaly, I carried out a manual check without finding anything suspicious.

To get around this problem, I selected the entire note and manually reapplied the font style. This allowed me to correct this note and move on to the next, repeating the process for several other footnotes.

However, after interrupting and resuming my work session, the Font Manager again redirected me to the first footnote, which had already been corrected.

Problem solved

After further analysis, it was found that the root of the problem lay in the non-Latin characters present in some footnotes. By changing the font used for these non-Latin terms, the incompatibility alerts disappeared, and the tool stopped reporting these errors.

Suggestions for improvement

To improve the user experience and optimize this tool, here are a few suggestions for the Font Manager:

• Precise identification: The tool should be able to specifically identify incompatible characters or problematic sections, rather than systematically referring to the first occurrence of the style concerned.
• Better management of non-Latin scripts: Distinguish more clearly between incompatibilities linked to non-Latin writing systems and propose alternative fonts adapted to the characters detected, like in preflight.
• Navigation in localization: Add a forward-backward navigation system to the Locate functionality, rather than one-way navigation.

These improvements would increase the tool's accuracy, reduce the time needed for manual error correction and make the process more user-friendly and efficient.

[walt.farrell]

You might try Preflight rather than Font Manager. It should also flag that situation, but in more detail, and double-clicking on the error message should take you to the spot and, I think, highlight the exact characters. 

I think the Font Manager is just showing you all uses of the font, which is what it's designed to do, and not the problematic characters.

[Pyanepsion]

Thank you for your reply. The error message did indeed mislead me, even after using Preflight. I had temporarily put aside the typography issue to concentrate solely on the footnotes.

Suggested improvements:

1. Clearer error message: The “Unsupported characters use” message associated with the Locate button is misleading. A more explicit message, such as “Incompatible characters. See Preflight” would avoid this misunderstanding.
2. Improved navigation: more intuitive navigation, as in Preflight or the Resource Manager, would allow you to view all occurrences of a font at once. At present, you have to scroll through the entire document without any real visibility, and if you are interrupted, you have to start all over again.

These adjustments would make font management more efficient, especially for multilingual documents.

[fde101]

5 hours ago, Pyanepsion said:

The “Unsupported characters use” message

It is actually "Unsupported characters used" but the column in your screenshot is too narrow so the "d" is being cut off.  This is probably a function of screen size or scaling settings as I did not need to resize anything to see it on mine - the whole message was there when the window opened.

 

5 hours ago, Pyanepsion said:

A more explicit message, such as “Incompatible characters. See Preflight” would avoid this misunderstanding.

If your column is already too narrow, this longer message would get off as well.  Also, there is nothing any less "misleading" about this, all it does is add a suggestion on where to look for more details - this may be useful for navigation purposes but doesn't really change anything about what is being said in the Font Manager.  Either way it is just telling you that there are characters in the text which don't exist in the font, which is more than the Font Manager is really intended to be used for anyway.  Finding errors of this nature is really in the domain of the Preflight Panel.

While I am not opposed to finding some reasonable way to improve this (maybe the message could instead be turned into a hyperlink that opens the preflight panel with the relevant characters referenced, assuming this particular test is even enabled in Preflight?), I don't agree that the current message is misleading.

 

5 hours ago, Pyanepsion said:

more intuitive navigation, as in Preflight or the Resource Manager, would allow you to view all occurrences of a font at once

This has come up before.  The suggested workaround for the moment is to use the Find and Replace panel and search for the font in which you are interested; as this already presents an interface for navigating multiple results, perhaps a "Find Usage" button (or similar) could be added to the Font Manager, which would simply open the Find and Replace panel and execute a query in it to find the selected font?

 

 

EDIT: in thinking this through, perhaps the Find and Replace solution is also the way to get around the issue with the option potentially being turned off in Preflight?  Perhaps Find and Replace could be extended with a filter for finding characters which do not exist in the font (the "Unsupported" characters as mentioned above).  Then the above-suggested hyperlink would instead open Find and Replace and run a query on it for unsupported characters in the particular font the message is displayed for (by using the existing Formatting filter and the new Unsupported Characters filter together)...  just a thought.

[Pyanepsion]

The French message uses an unusual formulation. It's more like: incompatible characters have been used.

Similarly, the window (and menu) don't support fonts (Arial, Cambria Math, Kokila, etc.), but fonts (Times New Roman Bold, Times New Roman Italic, etc.).

Adding a link or a button could indeed be the solution.