Hi. I apologise in advance, this has probably been answered but I cannot find it. I did check the videos and I still cannot figure out how to change the font family in compile!
In “Compile” I created a new Project Format and I went to edit the Section Layout. I changed the font family for EVERY SINGLE option but when I leave that window, the Section Layout looks exactly the same. (I wanted to share screenshots but it won’t let me)
And when I compile the font family has not changed ANYWHERE.
If you want to change the entire manuscript, the easiest way is the master font override, at the top of the center pane of the main Compile screen. It says “font” and a dropdown menu.
If you want to change via Section Layouts, be sure to check the “Override” button at the bottom of the Section Layout Formatting pane.
If you’ve used a “body” style, neither of these will work. (Which is one reason not to use a “body” style.) You’ll need to edit the Styles pane in the Compile Format editor.
First question: have you set a “Body” (or “Normal”) style in the editor as you would do in Word? If so, that’s your problem.
In Scrivener, all “body” text should be “No Style” which is displayed in the editor with the font, size and ruler attributes set (globally) in Settings > Editing > Formatting or (per project) in Project > Project Settings… > Formatting.
On compiling everything in “No Style” will become “Body” in DOCX or “Normal” in RTF.
Any styles you set in the editor will be preserved on compile, so should be kept for paragraphs or stretches of text which differ from the main text, like headings or block quotes.
So, if you make a “Body” style, setting it to your preferred working font—lets say you prefer working using a mono-spaced font so you set it to “Menlo Regular”. When you come to compile that font setting will be preserved throughout… and you will lose any italics or bold face in your text, because “Menlo Italic” and “Menlo Bold” are not “Menlo Regular”.
In general, the less information you give a style the better. For instance, You want your block quotes to be indented left and right, but have the same font and size settings as the main text: set it as a Paragraph style and omit any font and size setting.
If you have got that straight, then in the Compile dialogs there are a couple of things to be aware of:
You can set a global font for compile. At the top of the main dialog it says Font: Determined by Section Layout:
Click on the up-down indicator and you can set the font for the whole document apart from anything that you have assigned a style with font defined. It means you won’t have to go through each of the Section Layouts individually.
At the bottom of each Section Layout editor, note the checkbox where it says: Override text and notes formatting.
If you want to change it everywhere, use the second option I’ve shown (this one just above). Default Paragraph formatting and just set all of your layouts to use it too.
Ah, if you’d said “ePub” at the top… that makes all the difference. Don’t spend time and energy on details of font and layout. And take note of what I said abour “Body” style. That is irrelevant in ePub and can only create other niggles.
The thing is that with ePub it is the Reader who controls font, size, spacing, justification. ePub is basically a subset of HTML, so the actual compiled file is plain text.
As I’ve shown, you can set the default formatting for you epub file. But, as @xiamenese implies, quite possible that your ereader or app won’t let you see any difference. (You’d have to go in the settings for it to display the content in the “original formatting” – named like this or something relatively similar.)
There’s no point. All ePub devices I know (both physical and virtual) allow the person reading to set font, size, justification, spacing and in many cases theme, to what they want.
If you really want to get into the CSS (cascading style sheet) you can set all that, but (a) it’s a huge rabbit hole if you’re not already up-to-speed with developing CSS, and (b) the reader will likely override it anyway.
I read on my iPad using Apple Books and Kobo and Kindle apps. As I read in bed (when I can’t sleep particularly), I use a dark theme, which means I don’t disturb my wife; if I read during the day, I use a light theme with a different font and size. On computer, as well as those, I also use a couple of other apps to check my ePubs (Yomu, Readest and FBReader). All of them allow me to change all of these settings. In fact, anything I compile to ePub I open in each in turn and cycle through the different settings to see how it comes out in each.
So I’m doing everything right and there is nothing I can do to change the font family in EPUB?
Bear in mind that to display something using a chosen font, you must be a licensed user of the font, and have it installed on all devices that would display it. Chances are very high—even if you’re using something extremely ubiquitous and so generic there is no point in even stipulating a preference, like Arial or Georgia—that the ebook device your reader will be using to read it will not have the font.
If this is your first foray into ebook design, you might consider getting some books on the craft. There are a lot of clever things you can do to make your work stand out, and Scrivener has ample capability to help you implement those designs into the compiled output, but font families, margins, leading, justification-or-not, and even font sizes (other than relative to 1.0=body text), are generally out of bounds, particularly in the body text. Good book designs are going to step out of the way as much as possible in those areas, in fact, to allow for reader preference to work unimpeded. You don’t want your book to be that one awkward one that makes people have to go in and mess with their settings in order to comfortably read it.
It can be a lot of fun, even if you just learn a little bit, enough to make some adjustment to chapter headings or to make the ToC look nicer.
