Italics vanish at font change

Hello all!

I’m new to scrivener and have only been using it for about a year. Lots of features I’m clueless about, but I’ve figured out the simple stuff. I’m using scrivener for Mac and have the most recent version.

Anyway. Today I changed the font of my (90k long) document and lost all the italics. (I always do this when I get to the editing stage; it’ll help my brain view the text as something new.) I did a search here and found lots of comments about presets and stuff, none of which I understand any of - all I did was highlight the text (command+a), hit the drop down menu for font up top, and pick a new font. What I understand to be th simplest most standard way to change the font in a document (I do this in word, libreoffice, and gdocs). I didn’t go into any fancy settings with a lot ticky boxes. I did cycle through a few different fonts before I settled on one. I also didn’t realise all the italics were lost until I’d spent an hour editing and hit a section that should’ve been heavy on italics and saw them all gone (or I’d just have ctrl+z’d it all).

So my question is, what happened? Did I inadvertently cycle through a font that doesn’t support italics (in which case it’d have been nice to get a popup warning me I’m about to lose formatting and asking if I want to proceed) or is there a setting somewhere I’m not aware of? I’m not looking for ways to get my italics back, it’s not a big deal as I can just put them back in as I edit (and at any rate, I’m too generous with my use of italics so maybe this will help me get rid of the excess…) but for future reference, I’d like to understand what went wrong so I can prevent it from happening again.

ETA to add: I didn’t lose any of the bold, only the italics. In case that makes a difference.

Yes, you probably cycled through a font without italics.

For future reference, it’s not a bad idea to test a formatting change like this on a single document before applying it project wide. It’s also never a bad idea to have an extra backup before making big changes, which you can create with the File -> Backup -> Backup Now command.

Katherine

I just tested all the fonts I tried (courier new, palatino, times new roman, and my final choice, PT serif) and they all have italics, so now i’m not convinced that’s what’s went wrong.

i do have backups! multiple. my only issue is that i’d gone through an hour of edits on the no-italics document before realising what was up. (and never having experienced italics vanishing before, i’d not thought to check for that before starting the editing process.) so it’s a mild annoyance, but not something i can’t live with for this project.