Courier font replaced by courier new - why?

The font book is an app that (like Scrivener) accesses the system’s installed fonts.

Okay, but… as I wrote: “Cardiff, Crimson Pro and EB Garamond don’t show up there.”

EDIT: And neither in other apps. So this indicates that those fonts are not “installed” in the way we use this word. But… they’re available inside of Scrivener. Which means:

  1. I was kinda right, sort of, accidentally. But technically not really.
  2. Same goes for kewms’ reply – just the other way around.
  3. The OP can use “Courier Prime” (in Scrivener) right away, no matter what we say.
  4. I’m trying to convince you that you’re wrong when you said I’m right.
  5. Holy cow…

Interesting! You are correct, but why in the world would Scrivener use its own font dialog or fonts list?

(I’m going to install those fonts and put an end to the discrepancy.)

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@AmberV Any ideas? It looks like they are open source fonts dating back to 2013, so my guess is they’re used in a template or something, but I couldn’t find them.

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I suspect they somehow “register” (add) these fonts to the standard font dialog. This would of course only make them available in Scrivener. But why… “Courier Prime” would be super useful for the Scriptwriting Mode. Maybe there’re use cases for the other fonts, too.

To explain it, we need a non-use case.

That’s like rating the tastiness of an empty glass of milk. :smile:

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Exactly. We need a reason to leave these fonts out of the system install, not a reason to include them in Scrivener’s font list.

Do you need / want them in general?

Not the point. I have hundreds of installed fonts, why not a few more? That’s what I’m looking for: a reason they wouldn’t be installed.

Hmmm. Maybe the idea was to make those fonts available (because Scrivener relies on them) without cluttering the user’s system fonts. Which also comes with the risk of users uninstalling them.

I don’t think cluttering is an actual problem. Could it be that Literature & Latte has limited licenses to them?

Wouldn’t be a problem with open source fonts (read: not a bigger problem than bundling them with the software to begin with). But the “uninstalling risk” could be. We won’t know unless L&L tells us.

@gloveman: Courier font isn’t available anymore. It was replaced by courier new. Why?

Maybe you disabled it in Font Book? Maybe Apple does not include it any more (assuming you’re running 10.12). As others have noted, with the exception of a few fonts it makes exclusively available from within Scrivener, it doesn’t have anything to do with your available fonts, and merely uses Apple’s infrastructure for font handling, top to bottom (so from that we can deduce that part of that infrastructure allows for software to supply additional fonts for its own use).

As for why these fonts are not installed, the answer is very simple: it is not possible for software to install fonts to the system without an actual installer, last we checked, at least through official mechanisms (I can write a program that “installs” fonts by copying them into ~/Library/Fonts, but that’s not a clean way of handling things).

Courier Prime is used for screenplays, unless one has Final Draft Courier installed. One is free to go into the .app resources and copy them to their library folder if they wish to make them available in other programs (and in fact, for Courier Prime, that’s probably a good idea if you intend to compile scripts to RTF instead of FDX).

As for the other fonts, I am unsure of their purpose, but it is not unusual for software to include fonts for its own UI and such, and if the licence allows for it, why not for editing text as well?

@drmajorbob: How do you know? How can we tell the origin of an installed font?

In Font Book, select the font you are curious about, and hit ⌘I to get info. It will state a bunch of details about the font, among them the Location, which shows the precise path to the font software on the disk. Courier, to use macOS 11 as an example, is provided by the system and is located in /System/Library/Fonts/Courier.dfont.

There is also a File ▸ Show in Finder menu command.

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The fonts we were talking about are not in Font Book, and that’s how we knew they came from Scrivener. Now that I’ve installed them, Font Book won’t tell me where I got them.