AFFINITY DESIGNER

Version tested: 2.5.5

Operating system tested: PC

Date tested: 11 October 2024 / Missy Meyer

Cost: $69.99 USD / €74.99 EUR, one-time payment

Where to get it: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/

Demo version: Yes, 6 months (!!)

Font file types to use: TTF/OTF, double stroke

Image file types to use: SVG, EPS

How to See & Use the Fonts

First, make sure that the font is installed on your computer or device. Check the “Install fonts on [operating system]” guides for more information.

Open up a new artboard in Affinity Designer.

Use the text tool to type in your words or phrases. It’s fine if they appear in your default font; we’ll change that in a moment.

Select your typed text, then go to the drop-down menu of font names. Pick the name of the double stroke font you want to use. (The sample text may not appear on the right side of this drop-down, since its lines are so fine.)

When you change the font, your typed text may disappear from view; you’ll just see an empty selected object.  That’s OK!  Visit your Character panel (if you don’t have it pinned, go to Window > Text > Character in the top bar menu) and apply a stroke.  You can make this stroke as light or as heavy as you like; this example has a 1 point stroke.

You can also change the color of the stroke on your Color menu. (Window > Color from the top bar menu, if you don’t have Color pinned in place in your sidebar.)

At this point, you can retype your text as much as you want.  But if you’re ready to resize, rearrange, or export your design as an SVG file, you’ll need to convert the text to vector shapes.

Select your text, then click on Layer in the top bar menu, and choose Convert to Curves. Alternately, you can select the text, then use the Ctrl+Enter shortcut.

Affinity converts each letter into its own vector shape, and groups them together. If you’d rather not have them grouped, it’s easy to separate them.  Click on the group over in your Layers menu (also accessible via Window > Layers from the top bar menu) …

And then go to Layer > Ungroup from the top bar menu. Alternately, you can use the Ctrl+Shift+G shortcut to ungroup.

Once your text is converted to vector shapes, you can move the letters around to your heart’s content.

Be aware that because this is a double stroke font, the outline starts at one end, traces the length of the letter to the other end, then doubles back and retraces the letter back to the start.  This means that if you go into node mode and pull on a node, you’ll separate one stroke from its double, and get some funky filled areas like this.

Once you’ve created your design, it’s time to export. Go to File in the top bar menu, then select Export. (Or you can use the Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S shortcut, but a four-fingered shortcut seems a bit excessive to me.)

You’ll get the Export pop-up; make sure you’ve selected SVG as the file type, and then you can click on the Export button at the bottom of the pop-up.  (I don’t usually change any other settings in here, but if you have preferred SVG settings, you do you.)

ADVANCED: You can use the true single stroke version of a font (in the case of our example, the Spicy Sketcher 1 font) if you want to put in a bit of work! Affinity Designer, like most programs, doesn’t like the open contours of a single stroke font, and closes the contours with a straight line connecting the start and end points. Here’s Missy’s YouTube video showing how you can remove that extra stroke to get the true single stroke letters!

How to Access Alternates, Ligatures, and Extended Character Sets

Some fonts will have extras, such as multi-letter ligatures or alternate characters. The example font, Spicy Sketcher, has both of those.  In this example, I want to manually choose to replace two regular lowercase bs with the double-letter ligature.

But when I go to the Glyphs panel (Window > Text > Glyphs from the top bar menu), I can’t see any of the letters. Affinity doesn’t apply a stroke here, and since the letters have no fill, they all appear invisible.

One way to work around this issue is to install the single stroke version of the font:

The letters look funky in the Glyphs grid, but you can often figure out which letter they are.  Here I’ve been able to select that double-b ligature.  Once the ligature is selected, you can then change its font back to the double stroke version. 

Why do the letters look so funky? It’s because in that version, Affinity is connecting the end point to the start point with a straight line, then filling in the entire shape. Here’s a peek at that Glyphs grid; everything looks incredibly weird.

A second way to work around this is if the font also has an outline version.  In this case, Spicy Sketcher was built from Spicy Sugar, which is an outline font.  So I can select the double-b ligature from Spicy Sugar.  Once the ligature is on the artboard, I can select it and change the font back to Spicy Sketcher.

A third method is if the font designer has included a PDF guide that contains all of the characters of the font.  You can select the character you want, then copy it using Ctrl+C (Cmd+C on a Mac), and then paste it into place back in Affinity.

And a final method is to use a secondary program to copy/paste those ligatures, alternates, or extras. The quickest and easiest options are Windows Character Map on a PC, or Font Book on a Mac. You can find guides to both of those in the “Software Guides” section of this site.

How to Use SVG or Other Alphabet Sets

Some fonts will include a vector file containing the character set of the font, all in a true single stroke format.  If the font includes that, here’s how to use it. (The most recent ZIP for Spicy Sketcher includes this type of file.)

Click on File, then Open in the top bar menu.  (Or use the Ctrl+O shortcut.)

Navigate to your unzipped folder full of files, and select the SVG file containing the character set. Click the Open button.

This will open up the full character set in its own artboard, usually with a transparent background. The characters may or may not be grouped, depending on how the designer saved the file.

The characters will be organized depending on the whims of the designer.  In this specific font, they’re set up as:

• Basic alphabet A-Z and a-z
• Numbers and number forms
• Alternate letters
• Multi-letter ligatures
• Fractions
• A boatload of punctuation
• Accented characters

I’ve zoomed in here to show what these characters look like with a fill color turned on.  The stroke is black, while the fill is blue. So be sure to set the fill to transparent if it isn’t already! Fill doesn’t know any better, and it’s just connecting the start and end points of the letter with a straight line in order to fill in the shape.

Since each letter is an individual vector object, you can move them around as you like, and copy/paste each one for duplicates.  And because these are built from strokes instead of outlines, you can tilt, turn, and resize them as much as you like; as long as you apply the same stroke weight to each letter, they’ll all fit together. (As opposed to outline fonts, where if you resize a letter much larger, the strokes are much heavier.)

You can build your design on the same page as the full alphabet if you like, then select it and copy it to a fresh artboard.  Or you can copy/paste each character to a fresh artboard as you go.  Whatever floats your boat.

When you’re done with your design, you can export it as an SVG file as shown above!

If this program has been updated since this test and this guide no longer works, please drop me a line at the contact form so I can update this page!