I work with Scrivener 3 for windows.
I write as a hobby, but my trade is in design.
As such, I have hundreds of fonts loading on my system for various work related projects. Scrivener struggles to load these (and really, I only use about ten fonts across all my writing projects).
Is there a way I can limit the pool of fonts Scrivener pulls from?
Like most programs, it just loads whatever is installed into the system on startup and has no way of being selective about that (pretty sure itâs just a request to the system). Do you have a font management utility that could perhaps rotate things out that arenât presently necessary?
What sort of struggles are you running into? Is there a long launch process, menu lag, etc?
TROUBLESHOOTING:
I attempted to use the font management system built into windows (as per your suggestion) to hide fonts I donât need at the moment, however Scrivenerâlike Microsoft Wordâseems to generate itâs own font lists, so this method wasnât effective.
The only issue I have with the large number of font, is when I click the âFontâ drop down menu, it flashes a faint rectangular menu shapeâas if itâs going to open the fonts listâthen it disappears without opening.
This is rectified by simply clicking the drop down menu a second time, which opens the font list as expected. (I assumed this was an issue with how many fonts I have installed so I didnât report it as I figured it was an error caused on my end.)
SOLUTION:
However, I managed to come up with my own solution. I just created and configured my own âStyleâ settings for the fonts I wish to use which was simple enough as my current writing project is utilizing only two major fonts.
The âStyleâ menu opens without issue and after some basic testing, this method seems to have circumvented my problem and greatly decreased the time it takes me to format my text.
Overall, Scrivener seems incredibly capable of operating despite the unusual conditions Iâve placed it under.
Thank you for the assistance!
Thanks for the updates! That is curious that it works on the second click. Is that the second click per session, or after any interval of time?
I wonder if a good general purpose solution to this might not be a checkbox in options somewhere that disables font rendering in this menu. Honestly, one of the reasons I rarely use that menu is because of how it looks. I know what I want by name 100% of the time, and if for some reason I need a light table view of my system fonts as a matter of perusal, I can pull it up in Windows. So some might want a setting like that as a matter of choice, but in cases where there are +1k fonts installed, it could also be a necessity.
That aside, another thing that should work a lot better than the menu is to use the keyboard shortcut for Format ⸠Font ⸠Show Fonts..., which brings up a panel that doesnât do any kind of rendering of the fonts, it just lists them all normally. I tend to prefer that panel for the above reason, and also because I find itâs much easier to search for the font I want in the text field and I donât have to reach for the mouse/reveal the Format Bar to switch fonts.
But the Styles approach you came up with is also good, particularly since in most cases, if youâre selecting a font, you probably want that font to persist through the compilerâs default approach of cleaning up formatting, anywayâand Styles are the way to do that in a most straight-forward way.
Curious. I just tested the font drop down menu issue, and I noticed if I stay on one scene and click, itâll freeze up like I described, and on the second click work as expected. As long as I am working on the same scene, if I wait, then click it againâit still opens fine.
BUT --if it switch to a different scene or chapter in the binder, the problem reappears. This is the case during a session (Iâve been on Scrivener for 4 hours at the time of writing this), and after I closed out my project and re-launched it (which I did just now to test this).
Also, I didnât know about the shortcut, thank you!
Like you, Iâm very familiar with the fonts I prefer in my personal projects so I donât have a need for them to be rendered. I would love to have an option to disable that.
Thank you for your response!
All right, Iâve added some notes to the suggestion pool that should help if they are implemented. Caching the font menu more persistently seems like something we should do no matter what, per session at the least. It shouldnât be lost every time you switch documents in a project. We also have on the list a mechanism for pinning the most used fonts at the very top of the menu, which should also help a lot once implemented.
Ahoi,
I have a somewhat similar problem with the font drop down - since I updated to v3.1.1.0 this week, in some projects it doesnât work properly, it only pops up for a second (with fonts rendered and all), then disappears again, before I can select a font.
I have only 174 fonts installed, so the amount shouldnât be a problem. It also seems to be at least partly dependent on the font, to which the document in the editor is currently set, e.g. a text set to âFranklin Gothic Mediumâ will have the drop down dysfunctional, however, when I switch to e.g. âSource Code Proâ (via context menu), the drop down suddenly starts working like it should: after one initial failure, on the next click it makes some kind of little jolt and then stays open normally. It is kind of weird and a bit tricky to reproduce, but the least I can say is that something with the function handling that drop down is going wonky under certain circumstancesâŚ
I couldnât tell if people are discussing the font list under File->Options->Editing->Formatting, but that is the one I have problems with.
If I click the down arrow of the font combo box to select a font, the font list appears then immediately closes. But I found that if I click on a font as soon as the list appears, the list will stay open and let me select a font. However, you have to click exactly on a font name and you have to be quick, so it may take some practice to duplicate.
(This is using Scrivener 3.1.1.0)
Thanks for pointing that out, Iâm not seeing that happen on my end, but I do see very similar with the Styles dropdown in the compiler. Iâve found I have to use the click, drag and release method of using menus there. Does that work better for you?
RE: drag and release. Yes, that works with the Editing-Formatting font combo problem. As long as the mouse button is not released after clicking the down arrow, selecting a font is possible. And using that method is not necessary as long as the Options dialog is open after that. But once the Options dialog is closed, you have to go through the drag-then-release process again to get the font list to stay open.
Okay thanks, Iâll add that detail to the report.
A post was split to a new topic: Crash when selecting fonts for certain UI elements