Font Manager - Actually managing fonts (Affinity Publisher 2)

[Phil E]

Hi, 

I came across this issue/ux annoyance/lack of functionality when I was trying to update a poster file using Affinity Publisher 2.5.5 (on windows 10). The Font Manager.... doesn't manage fonts. It seems to simply display the fonts in your document and allow you to locate instances of said fonts. The 'substitute' function doesn't substitute fonts, but rather displays the substitute in the viewport without replacing it with the new font (why would you ever want this in a production environment, it will cause problems when sending to print, not to mention layout shift). 

My question is WHY? A font manager should be able to manage fonts, otherwise call it a font viewer. I would expect the manager to be able to, at the least, replace one font with another throughout the whole document. Even the help text seems to indicate that you can replace the fonts:

To substitute a missing font for another:

1. From the Substitution column, select a replacement font from the pop-up menu.
2. From the Substitution Style column, select the replacement font's attribute (such as bold or italic) from the pop-up menu.

At the moment, it looks like I would have to use locate to find every instance of the missing font one at a time and manually change it in the Character panel. That's okay for my current use on a poster where a missing font may only occur 5 or so times in the document. However, I deal with projects from posters to annual reports and books that might be 50-500 pages. Finding and replacing all instances of a missing font in a 500 page book manually would be time-consuming in the extreme, and costly for the client. 

Please give some logical thought to implementing the following changes in a future update:

1. Font Manager: manage fonts with ability to replace missing fonts with fonts you select. Same as current but instead of 'Substitution' make it 'Replacement'.
2. Similar functionality as indesign where if there is a missing font that appears in a Paragraph or Character style, the style is updated when the font is replaced.
3. Ability to change all, or some instances of the fonts.

It's these seemingly little things that prevent me from moving to Affinity from Adobe, and it mainly comes down to efficiency in production. If I have to spent a number of hours to manually make changes that should be done in seconds to a minute, I cannot justify that time sink.

If I'm missing this functionality because it's in another menu somewhere, please enlighten me. That begs the question, why isn't it in the font manager in the first place?

Edited November 7, 2024 by Phil E

[Pšenda]

2 hours ago, Phil E said:

Finding and replacing all instances of a missing font in a 500 page book manually would be time-consuming in the extreme