A colleague needed help creating a letterhead template for use in Pages on iPad.
It happens that I’ve created some collateral items for our common work on Mac, using Affinity Designer to generate the appropriate bits such as PNG or PDF files. The task she wanted to accomplish is easy on Mac Pages. But the iPad version requires something like 10 steps to get the graphic onto a blank page, cut it, open the header cells, and finally paste it into the cells. It’s really pushing the limit of tablet-based interfaces, but it’s not the issue I ran into.
My collateral uses the font “Roboto Slab” (which looks a lot like “Rockwell”). I couldn’t simply give her a template because she would not have those fonts on her iPad—and sure enough, when I experimented on my own device, I got system font renditions of my work.
We solved the immediate problem by using a cropped PDF with fonts converted to curves, which is what I would do if I were designing for press work.
But I first explored how she could add the Roboto Slab font to her iPad. It turns out that iPadOS has a system that allows the end user to “purchase” an app from the App Store. The app appears to be a vehicle for a payload of fonts. So, when you download that app, you’re really buying a font package, and none of the developers who have those apps on the App Store seem to think it very important to list which fonts you might be getting.
What I’m looking for is an app like the Font Mover on classic MacOS…what amounts to an installer for free-standing font files. Apple deprecated that approach in favor of self-installing font files years and years ago on MacOS, but it appears for iPadOS it would be an evolutionary next step.
Am I missing something about how iPadOS fonts work? Is there a utility I have overlooked that would load in TTF fonts and make them available to the system?