Affont 1.2.4: ligatures and alternates from Affinity, a warning before replacing letters, and better tracing

This update comes almost entirely from what you wrote in. Thank you! What’s new:

Ligatures and alternates from Affinity

Until now, Send ignored anything you drew outside the cells of a template. Now you can keep drawing right there:

• Draw a ligature or an alternate anywhere outside the cells, in a template or in the .af from Affont, and click Send. The letters in the cells go in, and New characters opens with the new shapes at your font’s size.
• Type what each shape is. Letters typed together are a ligature (“TH”), and a letter your font already has can go in as an alternate with replaces ⇄.
• Once you name a shape, it doesn’t come back the next time you send.

You can also use more than one template for the same font: letters in one, ligatures and alternates in another. Everything ends up in the same project, and Send only reads the document you’re looking at.

See what changes before replacing letters

Before replacing letters in your font, Affont now shows you each one as it is and as it’s coming from Affinity, at the same scale and on its baseline. You choose letter by letter, or all at once. With many letters, the window switches to compact cards.

It asks when:

• A letter changed in Affinity and you also retouched it in Affont.
• A letter came from another document, and this one has it different.
• You click Reload .af with a file saved before your last Send. This one used to bring the old letters back without warning.

A letter you only changed in Affinity goes straight in, so it won’t ask you every time.

Send from Affinity

• Sending with two documents open works, for example a template from the script and an .af from Affont.
• One letter in question no longer holds up the rest: the others go in right away, and questions come one at a time, with a notification.
• If another app is using the connection with Affinity, Affont keeps trying and tells you which one it is.
• Template cells now arrive in reading order, and each send is imported only once.
• Pasting a stroke with no fill copied from Affinity turns it into an outline.

Better tracing in Letter sheet

Thin strokes and the tails of script letters no longer disappear when tracing, and the outline follows your drawing more closely, including the soft gray edges of the brush. The Smoothing slider still takes away as much roughness as you want.

New characters

• Dots and accents join the letter with the nearest ink, even on slanted letters.
• Short script letters resting on a baseline no longer merge with their neighbors.
• Rows drawn bigger in the same document come out at your font’s size, so accented letters match the rest.
• “AE” and “OE” are Æ and Œ again.

Space & kern

Smart spacing follows the air of your n again, or of your H in all-caps fonts, with Air of the H in the panel. Replace the existing kerning now starts checked when you space.

Alternates in Preview and Ligatures

The pink dots under letters with alternates, and double click to choose one, now also work in Preview and Ligatures. The Ligatures screen explains how to add a ligature or an alternate, with an Affinity button on each card.

Test texts in your language

The test texts in Kerning, Spacing and Preview start in the app’s language, and change right away when you pick another language in the Texts menu.

Import the Affinity scripts again

To send what you draw outside the cells, you need the new scripts: in Affont, Settings ▸ Scripts for Affinity ▸ Save…; in Affinity, Script Library ▸ ▾ menu ▸ Import scripts…. Affont reminds you if you still have the old ones.

Thanks to everyone who sent us emails, videos and font files. Keep them coming!