Mystery file deleted - now fonts not loading

[fowlerad]

I 'cleaned up' my mac a few months back and accidentally deleted a mystery folder. Now when I load old work and expect to see the 'Bold' variant of a font it appears visually as 'Regular'. In the Text Tool it shows up as 'Skia' (correct font) but with no style selected.

Skia.ttf is still showing up in my font library (with all font variations/weights) at System> Library> Fonts> Supplemental>

In Designer, I can manually go into each document, each individual text box, highlight the text, and select 'Bold'. This fixes the problem, but isn't ideal as each page of my work is made up of hundreds of tiny text boxes! I'd like old documents to load with all text in the same font variations/weights they used to.

What file might I have deleted by mistake? It was likely a file that used a fair bit of memory - which I can hopefully find in time machine.

Or is there anything else I can do as a fix?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Edited October 19, 2024 by fowlerad
Clarity - Deleted a mistake

[walt.farrell]

Welcome to the Affinity forums.

That sounds like you used a Variable Font in an Affinity release before 2.5, when they might have seemed to work but were officially "not supported". If you Save an Affinity file using a font, and an older release of the Affinity application, then when you Open that file using 2.5 the font is not properly recognized because 2.4 (and earlier) did not save all the necessary font information in the file to properly identify the variable font variation.

This is logged as a bug, AF-3248, but we don't know yet when Serif will address it.

For a better workaround than selecting Bold for each Text Frame:

1. If you used Text Styles, do the update via the Text Styles panel. (And, if you didn't use Text Styles, you may take this as a learning experience that they can be beneficial for your future work.)
2. If you also have Publisher, you could Open your file in Publisher which has the Find and Replace function. You should be able to find all the text using that font and change it to Bold in a much simpler operation.