.LastResort is a deep fallback for cases where no fonts on the system can display the characters. I have seen this problem myself, though on iOS, where if the font I wanted wasn’t installed it would jump to this instead of Helvetica as it should. Selecting all of the text and changing the font fixed it. My only guess is that the bug is misdirecting the fallback behaviour for missing fonts in some cases, to something it normally wouldn’t use for a missing font at all.
This is all well beneath Scrivener’s code, so it might more be acting at the messenger here for a Mac bug than the actual culprit. Additionally, by “missing font” we must think of that more as: missing the font the clipboard requests. There are multiple ways to talk about fonts inside of rich text formatting, and the way it is asking for Arial might not be how Scrivener would recognise that request. You see this problem a lot in word processors because there are no universal standards for how fonts should be addressed.
Something to check:
- Open the free TextEdit.app that comes with your Mac.
- Use the
Format ▸ Wrap to Pagemenu command. This will force TextEdit to use the same version of the text engine that Scrivener uses. - Perform a fresh copy and paste test from the original website text.
If you see it there as well, then there is nothing we can do about it, it’s a Mac bug. If that does work, then we’ll have to see if there is some way to blindly fix it. These are difficult to fix though, because like I say this behaviour happens “underneath” Scrivener’s programming. There is no way to debug that kind of behaviour, leaving the only option to blindly try removing chunks of code.
You can do similar yourself by the way: try creating a new “Blank” project in a throw-away location like Downloads, and without touching the window, editor settings or fonts, paste from a fresh copy. Does that work? If so, look at what editor settings you use that Blank does not. Anything at all might be a factor, from invisible characters showing, to the line numbering tool, to page view.
I should add: in most cases you’ll get the best result by exporting as .rtf / .docx from Docs, and importing the file into Scrivener. Copy and paste from browsers (especially), and even other word processors, has long been the least reliable way to move data around. I don’t know if it will fix this, but you’ll likely get better formatting all around.