Embedded fonts

[myname]

Dear Affinity,

We have been very excited about your products Designer and Publisher, which we have evaluated during the last weeks. As a music publishing company, we need very stable desktop publishing and vector editing software, and we try to avoid Adobe products (reason = subscription model, costs).

However, after some tests we have been very disappointed because of one reason: inability to use embedded fonts in a PDF if these are not present on the system.

As working in music publishing industry, we need to access all symbols in PDF documents in order to edit it properly. The music notation is very complex, and it is not so easy to swap fonts so simply. Also, many glyphs are created by users in the notation software which become not accessible in Affinity products. Sometimes it is impossible to find a font or a symbol that is used by music copyists in PDF documents created 10-20 years ago. Furthermore, music fonts on Mac and on Windows are not easily exchangeable - the same music font on Mac and on Windows have different encoding and different slots for symbols. In another word, the same font used for notation done on Mac, cannot be used within PDF in Affinity products when opened on Windows, despite the fact that the same font is installed on the same Windows machine (yet Windows version).

Therefore, we would recommend you to re-think about the way Affinity uses embedded fonts in PDF. Your software should not, in our opinion, consider legality, law-abiding or morality of users' intention. Your software should have characteristics of a desktop publishing or vector editing software only.
I hope that you will evaluate your approach to this issue.

 

Music publisher.