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I notice that this is a bit of glitchiness on the font display in Affinity Publisher 1.7.0.162.   When you select a font there is a shaded area on top.  I didn't really care about that before but not it shows duplicates of files that are activated.  I checked to see if there was a problem with the font but in Designer it works perfectly - only one font family is listed.  Please see images of Affinity Designer with that single font.  Also please see that Affinity Publisher top list shows the duplicate while the scroll list on Publisher shows only one listing on the font.  Hard to really explain.  Please see images. The font in question here is Wolpe Fanfare but I have seen this issue with a few other fonts (and they are correctly installed and work perfectly in Designer). 

AP search lists two font families.jpg

AD shows only one font family.jpg

AP scroll list shows only one font family.jpg

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It looks like it displays recently-used fonts as a shortcut to find them quickly at the top of the list?

 

Also, that is several versions old by now - you might want to grab the new one.  They haven't been putting them up there for "Check for Updates" for some reason, so they need to be manually downloaded from the link in the forum posting.

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The latest one I downloaded (from the main download site) manually says 1.7.0.162, which is the same version I have installed.  Is there a newer version and how may I get it.

As for recently used fonts I see that now.  I selected a few and they are at the top of the list.  Nice feature but looked like a glitch at first. Maybe some slight labeling for those not in the know.

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The newest version is always available from a topic pinned at the top of this forum. Currently it's 1.7.0.174.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
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I guess I've been living too long in the Affinity universe - Designer and Photo don't have that right now, except for the betas that I haven't gotten around to testing.  I noticed that Adobe Photoshop does but I use that only for serious compositing and not for any type work whatsoever.  You're right that InDesign does that as well but I stopped using that a while ago. So it was a surprise for me in Affinity.

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Also fonts don't lay out nicely in Affinity (Designer or Publisher) as they do in InDesign.  Here are screenshots from both InDesign (the dark image) and Affinity Publisher. I'm using one font that I have that has lots of typefaces. 

Affinity Designer.png

InDesign.png

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19 minutes ago, abarkalo said:

I'm using one font that I have that has lots of typefaces.

Or perhaps vice versa? ;) (For those who are unfamiliar with the terminology, a typeface is a font family and a font is one of the styles in that family.)

 

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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OK sure but same issue.  I thought further about this issue and even spoke with one of the major font designers.  Might be interesting to have a sort button (perhaps in preferences).  InDesign sorts by stretch (cond, normal, ext) and Affinity by weight (reg, med, bold)

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3 minutes ago, fde101 said:

a typeface is the visual design/layout of the text and a font is the software that produces that design

That’s a new one on me! The italic style of a serif font such as Times is very different from the regular style, but I don’t think anyone would argue that they anything other than different styles of the same typeface. Eurostile is a single sans-serif font family, but there are notable differences in the design/layout of the fonts Eurostile, Eurostile Candy and Eurostile Unicase.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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I think we went off topic here.  I just wanted to suggest new font listing ideas that would surpass InDesign etc.  Currently Affinity apps list fonts by weight ascending order.  That's fine when dealing with a family that have 12 fonts or less.  But when you have activated a family that has compressed, extended, normal, semiextended (let's call it stretch) etc all in the same family then things really get messy and by that I mean that it's really hard to scan for the font that you are looking for.  When I compare with InDesign, it seems they organize by stretch then sub sort by weight.  That makes the list very clean.  But it's not the only way to do things.

I want to use Affinity apps for everything I do, and their ease of use and amazing power surpass Adobe. But in the font department there are a few suggestions that I can make to surpass in that area as well:

1. Option/switch to hide system fonts.  Not a good idea to deactivate them but why see them at all in Affinity?  They are not design fonts, or should I say they interfere with my high quality design fonts.  This is my single biggest request here.

2. Sort options. Why just limit to one sorting technique - let's go to town.  For instance, sort by weight or stretch, or stretch and sub sort by weight, or weight and subsort by stretch.  If you use a font like Mercury Text with different contrast options (G1 through G4) then it's very nice to just scroll up and down with Affinity's live preview at the Roman G1 or Roman G2 or G3 or G4 and just focus on those contrast options - sort by weight and then subsort by stretch in this case.  If those fonts are not close together then it's hard to see the difference and that is crucial for making the right decisions.  Or if you just want to focus or a particular stretch group, say just the condensed types, then it's nice to scroll up and down on only those.  

3. Grouping.  If you use some FontFont or other font maker families then you are using some pretty massive families - some as large as 164 fonts.  This is where you really need some filtering or grouping.  What if I only want to work with the normal or condensed or perhaps only the semibolds in any given stretch? Then it would be nice to filter or group and not have to scroll up and down such a long list.

4. Pinning.  I was slow to figure out that the grayed out area was recently used fonts (looked like a visual glitch to me since this is new in Affinity!).  But I think to kick it up a notch it would be wonderful to pin something that I've filtered.  For instance I may want to pin only the condensed types in a given family.  Sure I can favorite them but I want to see this in the main list. Just an optional idea but something to think about.

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15 hours ago, abarkalo said:

grayed out area

Yeah, it doesn't really look the best either:

image.png.6acaabc70350f754e319489ca325418b.png

 

I think the preview against white when the rest of the line is gray is probably what bothers me.  I think the preview should be against the same gray as the rest of the line so that it is at least consistent.

 

Most programs that offer this use a separator line, and that would help as well...

 

QuarkXPress:

image.png.e1ae358bf82e7cdb493bbce6f868d407.png

 

 

(and yes, I almost certainly have way too many fonts installed right now...)

 

15 hours ago, abarkalo said:

Option/switch to hide system fonts

Some of the Mac "system fonts" are high-quality fonts licensed from type foundries that would cost hundreds of dollars to license if not bundled with the OS.  A generic "hide the system fonts" switch is probably not optimal...

 

 

15 hours ago, abarkalo said:

Grouping

You can do this using Font Book on the Mac; the "collections" can be used to filter fonts on the Character studio panel in the Affinity apps.

It would be nice if the selected collection was applied to the font menus in the context toolbar as well...  then you could leave the system fonts out of your collection and they would be hidden by nature of having the appropriate collection selected.

 

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Yes I agree with your cosmetic ideas on the font search bar.

As for system fonts I agree that these fonts are good quality fonts but they are not designer fonts. The reason to use any design program, especially Affinity Designer or Publisher, is to make some truly outstanding poster art or artwork, as well as business layouts etc. This is not going to happen with ANY of these fonts (I apologize for my snobbery).  I spend thousands of dollars each year to get the latest stylistic fonts and this has been a good commercial decision. What I do, as many designers do, is assign a set of fonts per color just as I would a custom color swatch group and a specific raw artwork folder.  If I try to install all my fonts into Font Book my system would crash.  So I have used Suitcase but now using Typeface 2 to manage and activate/deactivate group, per project name.  Typically a design layout can have one to five fonts - that's it.  So having to scroll up and down a list to find my own - each time - makes as much sense as having a thousand tool buttons on the app's UI.

As for grouping, whatever you group in Font Book doesn't match what shows up in Affinity.  But by the way, why not group all system fonts together - they're still there but perhaps you could be able to collapse them so they don't get in the way.  I could live with that in case the idea to hide/unhide system fonts isn't accepted.  

I just need Publisher, and Designer, to streamline to creative workflow and help me work more quickly. It does a great job now, but this is my wishlist as well as the idea of sorting by stretch or font weight.

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4 hours ago, abarkalo said:

by the way, why not group all system fonts together

Yes! Hey Apple, give me two groups of system fonts, the necessary ones and all the others which can then be turned off if I don't need/want them.

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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4 hours ago, abarkalo said:

whatever you group in Font Book doesn't match what shows up in Affinity

It does for me, including some fonts I added to a Font Book category that are activated through FontBase (a font manager) and are not installed on the system when that is not running.

 

4 hours ago, abarkalo said:

why not group all system fonts together

The software would need to know which fonts were the system fonts, and the only way it could do that would be to maintain a list, which would need to account for international fonts, changes with newer OS versions, and so on.  I suspect the only way you will get this is if you use some technique that allows you to group them yourself, thus my suggestion to leverage Font Book.

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1 hour ago, Old Bruce said:

Yes! Hey Apple, give me two groups of system fonts, the necessary ones and all the others which can then be turned off if I don't need/want them.

yes I have deactivated those but there's 522 fonts that one cannot deactivate.  Anyway a lot of people want to use system fonts - OK but I just want to be able to hide them. I don't need Times New Roman, a single font of Futura, or Zapf Dingbats etc in my design work.  For Word or Pages or Excel - sure - but not for Affinity.

Suitcase, Typeface, Rightfont are able to separate out system fonts.  Maybe there's metadata or other technique but it works well.  

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1 hour ago, fde101 said:

It does for me, including some fonts I added to a Font Book category that are activated through FontBase (a font manager) and are not installed on the system when that is not running.

yes I have deactivated the ones I could.  Still many remain

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13 hours ago, fde101 said:

You can do this using Font Book on the Mac; the "collections" can be used to filter fonts on the Character studio panel in the Affinity apps.

It would be nice if the selected collection was applied to the font menus in the context toolbar as well...  then you could leave the system fonts out of your collection and they would be hidden by nature of having the appropriate collection selected.

OK I see this now.  But then again I don't use Font Book for my massive font library collection - only system fonts in there.  And the lists that I make in Suitcase or Typeface 2 don't correspond, obviously - otherwise that would be perfect.

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