Apologies in advance: I’m pig-ignorant about how fonts work, so this question may be really stupid. But in brief: Scrivener seems to have issues rendering New York, the native Apple font wch comes w/ the Mac OS. Although New York does appear in Scrivener’s font-list, you can’t make it italic or bold (clicking on the dropdown toolbar menu only shows Regular, where other fonts give you the option of Italic, Bold etc). I think someone once explained that was because of the way Apple builds its in-house fonts.
Recently though, there’s been talk of Apple ‘releasing’ New York in a downloadable form (eg this article). My ignoramus’s question: does this mean that if I downloaded that version of New York, it would perform properly in Scrivener? Or is this ‘release’ only relevant to software developers, and not a solution to my Scrivener issue? I ask because I’ve always used New York when writing in Word (I know: hackneyed! — but one gets used to the look of things…), and I really miss it now I’m using Scrivener!
ETA: occurs to me that the same seems to be true of Lucida Grande. Though that isn’t an Apple font (I think?)… So am I barking up the wrong tree completely? (ignorant, ignorant…). Is there any other run-round this issue — it would be great to have LG back again too!
For anyone else, I really wouldn’t bother It is IMO both poorly designed (uneven spacing and sizing inconsistent with other fonts at the same point size) and fails to support basic opentype features (even ligatures, let alone anything else, check the opentype tables), with some glaring totally sloppy bugs in its character tables. How Apple consider this worth making public and claiming it has been “redesigned” for modern systems is utterly beyond me (there are a gazillion more functional fonts available, if you want a corporate family of free sans+serif that go together, go with IBM’s Plex).
Are you sure this is a native font? I don’t have it on my system, and I’m running the latest 10.14.6. You can of course download it from here, but you’ll want to review the usage rights, as the developer fonts often aren’t licenced for any kind of use outside of the UI or to display text locally (that’s why you can’t select San Francisco, despite being used in menus and such).
At any rate, once I install the full set of fonts for the one optimised to “Small” usage, I don’t have any problems switching between the many provided variants, either with the font palette, Format Bar or keyboard shortcuts.
Lucide Grande is indeed a native font—it is commonly used for uncommon Unicode characters, as it is one of the only native fonts that has a very comprehensive character set. It was also, back in the day, the default menu and UI font. Given its role as Unicode support and such, it never had a full complement of variants provided.
By the way, if you’re talking about how MS Word er… handles fonts, it uses a fake typography system to plug gaps in your font repository. I.e. if you don’t own bold it will smash a bunch of pixels around the letters to make them look fatter, or squish the letter sidewise a bit to make it “italic”. Apple, being the sort of elitist typographic snob that it is, would never resort to such barbarian practices! So instead if you hit ⌘B and there is no true hand-crafted bold variant, you get an error beep instead.
P.S. And yeah, nontroppo, I couldn’t agree more. It’s not up to the typical standards I would expect (and was just tongue-in-cheek making fun) of Apple.
So instead if you hit 