Font auto activation??

[postmadesign]

I am slightly confused by the following issue: I have Auto-Activation set up in RightFont, a font manager I am testing. Its is supposed to auto activate fonts for affinity apps. However I tried this with the app store version of designer, but though it does activate the font. When I manually activate the font it does not change the appearance in Designer. The font is displayed as the default fallback font no matter what I do. I have to close and re-open the document for the fonts to show up correctly. Note that when I activate a font I have not yet used and then use in Designer in the document it does so correctly.

Why is this in the beta thread? Well because the Beta apps do offer the correct font auto-activation. After activation the appearance changes directly. 

What I don't understand is why the Beta works differently than the app-store version. Has the code for this changed in the 1.7 versions? And if not why is there a difference? Will the 1.7 version once released behave as the 1.6 app-store version or the 1.7 beta?

[Sean P]

Hi Postmadesign,

There would have been a lot of fixes and changes made to fonts between 1.6 and 1.7 due to Publisher joining the ranks. This should indeed be working when 1.7 hits the app store - the only thing that may interfere is the sandboxing being a Mac App Store app, but until it hits the store there isn't anything we can really try!

[iaing]

Same issue here in Designer and still in the Beta too, also in Publisher Beta. It seems to work OK for just one font, but if there's a few fonts to auto-activate Designer doesn't recognise them all - they are all correctly activated by Rightfont but Designer just shows a default font. Closing and re-opening the file fixes the display. It's only Affinity apps that have this problem, every other app I have works fine with auto-activation.

By the way @postmadesign I've been using Rightfont for a few months now and love it - I'd been battling away with Font Xplorer for years, Rightfont's way better. And yes, I had this same issue while using Font Xplorer too.

[postmadesign]

@iaing I have been using FEX since version 1, when it was still a free app. I know it quite well, and most of the time it did a decent enough job. But the newer versions do not support auto activation for CS5, so I tried FontAgent Pro, which did offer this. It seemed to work OK, but overall it was very slow activating and deactivating font, and its database is way more complicated that FEXs. The newest version (9) is supposed to do auto-activation for Affinity apps, but Publisher crashes on start-up every time I tried this. After running into some more problems I switched back to FEX, only to have other problems there... I guess a lot of my problems are caused by having an older Mac (2011) with lots of fonts and old stuff on it which causes problems. I just ditched auto-activation for now as it was more trouble than it was worth and simply manually activate what i need. I tried RightFont and quite like the simple interface, although I have not put it through its paces. I will probably stick with FEX for now and might switch when I get a new Mac.

As for the specific Affinity problems you describe: especially the fact that activated fonts are not shown correctly is annoying, and it might catch you out if you are not careful, when exporting to PDF for print. I hope this gets fixed.

[dcrosby]

As a temp solution (and rather helpful in any case), a listing of font status in Affinity apps would be helpful. With a list I could more easily activate fonts in my manager of choice if auto activation was not available. I'm assuming most font managers will be slow to add Affinity support because... well... Adobe.