Is there anyway to change the default styles of the templates?
I’d like to change the “Novel” template to use Times New Roman rather than Optima - always. I’d also want all the chapter pages to be double-spaced. Is this somehow possible?
If you create a new project from the Novel template, and make your changes to that project, you can save it as a custom template. Once you’re done tweaking that project, you can delete it from your Documents folder, because custom templates are stored elsewhere.
The above advice is sound for the current version especially, but even for future versions as well. Using derivative templates or your own created from scratch is considered to be the way to customise how Scrivener starts off projects for you. Templates store their compile settings just like normal projects do, so whatever you set your custom template derivative will be saved for future use.
As alluded to above, we’ve got some cool stuff coming along that should make this particular font situation much, much easier.
Completely aside from all that, if what you mean is that you want to use TNR instead of Optima when working in the project editor–separate from compile (which has its own settings, and the Novel template’s default compile uses Courier)–that setting is taken from your global defaults, so you may want to just change this in the formatting tab of Preferences. That will affect all new documents and all new projects from any template, unless the template is set up so that the project has its own font to override the default setting. The Novel template (and I think all the pre-packaged templates) just uses your global defaults for this, so changing them will make the difference.