You know what's even stranger? I created a folder called assets -- just because that seemed like a good name. Had no idea it was a magic word...
Anyway, I placed a couple of fonts in there, but in my layout.nut, I just reference them like this:
local fonts = {
myFontA = "fontname1.ttf",
myFontB = "fontname2.ttf"
}
without reference to the assets folder, and my layout still finds them! AM seems perfectly content to render this correctly:
local myText = fe.add_text("Text goes here", 0, 0, 500, 100);
myText.font = fonts.myFontA;
Maybe the above can help you (somehow)? Maybe not, but figured I'd mention it!