Hello folks. For some reason the default Thai font in Scrivener is set to Thonburi. While it is a beautiful font, I need this changed to a preferred font (one that has the same height as the preferred latin font, which I set to Liberation Sans). Where can I set the Thai default font in Scrivener?
Normally the Mac OS just uses plain old Arial, so it was a bit odd to see Thonburi as the default.
Your help is appreciated.
Well, you can set the default font in the Formatting preferences pane, is that what you mean? I don’t know of a way to tell OS X to use one font over another when switching between keyboard input methods. I know it does switch fonts as needed, but I’m unaware of an interface for adjusting that. Whatever the case, it’s way below Scrivener’s domain where this happens. One thing you can do with Scrivener, if you’ve got a project that is all Thai but others aren’t, and so you don’t want to change the application default: each project can have its own default formatting settings. Use the Project/Text Preferences... menu command to activate this option and set it up. This setting will cause that one project to deviate from the application defaults.
Thank you for your speedy reply!
Unfortunately these projects are not simply Thai, but mixed English and Thai (and other projects will have mixtures of other Southeast Asian scripts as well). Note that this kind of control is in OpenOffice, so it may indeed be within the purview of Scrivener to support this. See the following YouTube for control over this feature in OpenOffice: youtube.com/watch?v=DZ0D23b6gy4
Sincerely,
Jeff
Ah, yeah that’s another challenge when they are mixed.
Well the problem for us is that we’re just using the Mac’s vast multi-lingual capabilities here. It’s the built-in stuff that makes it possible for menus to be printed in Thai, the “Okay” button and so on. It’s the root underlying text engine, and like I say that is way beneath anything Scrivener is doing. By that I mean: Scrivener is just asking the operating system for a text editing control. Keith has strapped a whole lot on top of that (otherwise it would just be TextEdit!), but it’s much more difficult to change stuff under that—to the text control itself at a fundamental level. Doing that is the stuff that gets you rejected from the Mac App Store, anyway.
OpenOffice, like Microsoft Office, aren’t using the Mac’s text engine at all. They have their own spelling systems; their own multi-lingual switching code; their own sub-pixel font rendering; their own keyboard interfacing; etc etc. It’s like a completely different planet in there.
So where you really need to be looking is how the Mac itself selects a default font for a language. Like I say I really don’t know where that is. I’d think it would be in the Input Sources tab of the “Language & Text” system preference pane, but I don’t see any font controls there. There might be some cool trick on the Internet though for doing this.
This is what I have found out there, a plist for OSX detailing default fonts. Tools like TinkerTool only seem to set the English font and not the other fonts. See: gist.github.com/3180490
Thanks for posting the tip! That looks to be just the thing you need to do. It’s a pity that Apple hasn’t exposed this configuration file in any interface, but the nice thing about these machines is that a lot about it can be controlled somewhere by a text file.