Affinity Publisher: Find Font

[ballardstudio]

How do you find fonts being used in a document? I navigated to Text> Find... and received an error (posted to the bug forum). Is there another way to view the fonts?

 

[Cineman]

I agree this would be useful, epsecially in a find-and-replace context where you want to find lingering characters, punctuation, other items of a specific font that are left over from a previous font that has been changed everywhere else. Basically "find every character that is still using this font and weight and replace it with this font and weight (or neighboring font and weight).

[walt.farrell]

In the Find & Replace panel (View > Studio > Find and Replace) click the cog/gear in the Find box and choose Options, then select the font you want in the Character Font section of options. You can use a similar function in the Replace section to change one font to another.   Edit: Thought there is a similar option for Replace, it is not usable to replace the style on the found text. Edit 2: Today, replacing fonts via Find and Replace works properly for me.

[Cineman]

Thanks. I was looking for this in the usual place.

Two things I would say to Affinity based on this implementation: there needs to be a way to access this panel from the Edit menu. It is standard practice across many apps to put find or find-replace commands in the Edit menu. People will look for it there, not in the view menu most likely. That is to say you can leave it as a panel (and accessible with all the others in View) but should be able to invoke it from both places IMO. At least as a default. If someone wants to simplify their edit menu and remove it later so be it.

Second thing is very good depth of functionality by including a lot of options via Format dialog, but I wonder if it might be better to have two format modes for that dialog — Standard and Advanced. Advanced is what's there now (i.e. all options to sift through, takes longer but more precise). Standard is simply font, font style, and maybe font size. Click advanced button to see all the rest. Also I would consider adding the same three replace options in the same dialog, in that mode.

Everything doesn't have to be as InDesign does it (otherwise we remake InDesign) but I do benefit from the simplicity of having a find font function that is only the simplest font parameters and the corresponding font replace options in a pop-up menu right below it. Very quick and accurate. Put another way: most of the time I use this function not to find specific kinds of glyphs, styles, bullets but just a font that I removed wholesale from the document but a find lines or characters get left behind and spotted on review.

[walt.farrell]

On 9/1/2018 at 11:49 AM, Cineman said:

Also I would consider adding the same three replace options in the same dialog, in that mode.

As I mentioned, the Replace part of Find and Replace has similar options. But I later discovered they're unusable, so I've updated my post above. Post edited (above) again, as replacing fonts works for me today.

[Cineman]

21 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

As I mentioned, the Replace part of Find and Replace has similar options. But I later discovered they're unusable, so I've updated my post above.

Right, what I'm saying though is right now they're "separate but identical" in terms of what can be selected, and the only mode is the "see every option available" mode. But on the other hand I prefer panels to modal dialogs (of which I think this first incarnation of the app has too many).

Maybe the answer is a customizable Find and Replace panel where we can select the controls we want visible on the panel, possibly even saving "panel presets" depending on the workflow. So my default might show a font, font style, and font color option while yours might show a bullet style, a caps style, and a font color. What each of us finds and replaces most commonly would be different but letting us choose our default controls means none of us have to drill down (most of the time) when we use this. That's assuming eventually all the things listed can actually be found and replaced. I'm sure there are some bugs.

[ballardstudio]

So are you saying that when the panel opens you can find fonts? My panel received the error. When I relaunched, Find was totally unresponsive.

[walt.farrell]

7 minutes ago, ballardstudio said:

So are you saying that when the panel opens you can find fonts? My panel received the error. When I relaunched, Find was totally unresponsive.

I use the Find and Replace panel, which you can activate via View > Studio.

[ballardstudio]

I was looking at something a little more for font usage as opposed to find and replace. This does work to an extent, but could work better for the designer who is looking to collect assets (still looking for an auto-collect panel) or wants to find and replace fonts quickly by family.

[walt.farrell]

1 hour ago, ballardstudio said:

I was looking at something a little more for font usage as opposed to find and replace. This does work to an extent, but could work better for the designer who is looking to collect assets (still looking for an auto-collect panel) or wants to find and replace fonts quickly by family.

I haven't seen anything to collect/package fonts. If you want to see what fonts are used (or might be missing), try Document > Font Manager.

[ballardstudio]

4 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I haven't seen anything to collect/package fonts. If you want to see what fonts are used (or might be missing), try Document > Font Manager.

Thanks! I know font collection may be a tricky one because of the copyright laws that are involved with fonts. Hopefully an auto-collect tool will be available before the full version launch.