I just transferred to a new laptop (Mac, Sierra) and reinstalled Scrivener, using projects stored in Dropbox. During the move I copied over Scrivener items from user/Library/Application Support and user/Library/Preferences.
Now on the new laptop I’ve found that the default font in Scrivener has reverted to Helvetica, so pages I open in Scrivener are now rendered in Helvetica rather than my preferred font. I know I can reset the default font in Scrivener Preferences/Formatting/Main Text Style, but that only seems to apply the font to new documents, rather than re-apply the default font to all the documents that were changed to Helvetica.
Is there something else I need to copy over from my old system, to bring back the old global default font, or a way to re-apply my preferred font to everything in a particular Binder? Or will I have to just manually re-apply the font to each document as I go?
That’s a good point, Helvetica is what the text editor falls back to using if it cannot find the assigned font on your system. This is, until you edit the text in any way, a display condition—it’s not actually assigned to Helvetica yet, but the system needs to use something to show the letters and numbers, so that is what it uses.
Chances are if you install the right fonts again and reopen the project, it should all look as expected, potentially even your preferences. Like I say anything you changed will have taken on Helvetica permanently though. For fixing cases like that, see this document.
Thanks for the replies - yes the intended font is installed in my system, it is a regular font that is part of the Sierra install. I understand that the system will default to Helvetica if an assigned font is unavailable, however in this case that is not true, the font is present in the top-level /Library/Fonts/, so I still can’t fathom why I have lost all my font-formatting. I have reinstalled my previous preferences and application support folder however the problem persists. As a long-term Mac user (since 1988) I can say I am usually pretty quick at working out something like this, but not this time! Any further thoughts appreciated.
I’d grab a backup of the project, generated from prior to migration so we know nothing has actively touched its RTF files and extract a copy of the project somewhere temporary for analysis.
Right-click and Show Package Contents on the backup, drill down into Files/Docs, and pull out of a copy of one of the shorter RTF files that should just be stock standard text, the simpler the better. Quick Look should help here—that’s a passive viewer. A one-liner would be best.
Then I would do the same thing on a copy of the project you have opened and looked at, with this same exact file. So you should now have two copies of the same RTF file set aside. If you can’t do that precisely, then a similar example should suffice. Mainly what we want though is an RTF Scrivener has opened and is now typesetting in Helvetica in parallel with an RTF Scrivener on Sierra has not touched.
Finally, create a new blank project, type in a little sample text, and manually assign the desired font to it. Close that project and again, pull out the RTF files for the test document. We should have three now. For checking the sanity of the system, I would reload the sample project and make sure the font is showing up correctly. We would assume so, since Sierra set it and Sierra is reading it, but might as well make sure the printer is plugged in so to speak.
Open all three RTF files in a plain-text editor (TextEdit with its Display RTF files as RTF code instead of formatted text option enabled would suffice), and check near the top of the file for a line resembling something like the following example:
That is a font macro being set up for Bodoni 72 Book, which is later used on the sample text by calling \f0. So what you’re looking for are variations in how the font is referred to at the “invisible code” level of these files, and whether any of them actually reference Helvetica directly. If one file refers to “BodiniSeventyTwoITCTT-Book” instead of “…SvtyTwo…”, then I would expect to have that file loaded in Helvetica.
Well as luck/fate would have it, my new laptop is faulty so I have to send it back. I’ll have another chance to get this right!
Thanks for your help so far, I’ll be back if it happens again.
Just a quick note to report that all is okay now - I finally received my replacement laptop, and reinstalled everything using Migration Assistant. This time all my Scrivener files have retained their original fonts/formatting, a great relief I still don’t understand what went wrong the first time, but thanks for the suggestions on the way.
I still don’t understand what went wrong the first time, but thanks for the suggestions on the way.