I’ve been using Scrivener for a few months now and love it. However, I recently realised that I’ve somehow lost my default Optima font! I love the look and feel of Optima but recently noticed that all new Scrivener projects were opening in Lucida Grande.
I went in to preferences and tried to reset the font for Default Note back to Optima, and Optima is listed in the drop down list. However, on clicking “Apply”, the font “jumps” back to Lucida Grande i.e. I can’t make the Optima choice stick.
I went in to OSX’s "Font Book’ and tried to find Optima there and it doesn’t seem to exist.
I am puzzled by this as I haven’t knowingly done anything to remove Optima, it has just disappeared. I would love to get it back as my default font in Scrivener. I’ve tried deleting Scrivener and all preference files using Appzapper and then re-installing but it doesn’t bring Optima back.
Any clues anyone? Please help me find my beloved default font! Thanks.
Very strange, pollycat. I think you must have inadvertently deleted the font from
your system, but I have nor guess as to how you might have done that. If it’s not in,
it’s probably not installed in your system. Check to see if you have a folder called
Fonts (not installed) in the first level of your hard drive. Yu may find it in there.
I’ve now found a solution - I did a Spotlight search for “Optima” and found the font lurking in Library > Fonts but not in my Home > Library > Fonts, so I opened up Font Book and used it to “install” the font over to my Home directory and now, presto, I can choose Optima again within Scrivener. Yippee! Problem solved!
Font availability should cascade. By that I mean, you shouldn’t need to list all of the fonts you need in your user book. If it doesn’t exist in the user book, the OS checks the system folders for font availability. The only thing I can think of is that you inadvertently used the “disable” feature from your user account on the Optima font set.
If you ever do entirely lose a system font (this one comes with the OS, not Scrivener), you can usually restore them using the OS DVD that came with your computer. Glad you got it sorted out with that mess, though.
Thanks for this tip, I appreciate it. I really have no idea what happened with the font, I didn’t knowingly delete it or anything, I just noticed something not looking quite right with Scrivener projects after a while and saw it was the default font.
Very strange thing, but I’m glad it was an easy fix in the end. This is such a useful piece of software to me, I’m enjoying it very much.