'Show Fonts' Freeze

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

I’m using a MacBook and have recently experienced a problem when trying to change fonts of some material I’ve imported from Microsoft Word.

  1. I select all to highlight the section of the text.
  2. Go to Text and
  3. select Show Fonts
  4. The font box pops up on my screen, and I either
  5. try to select “Recently Used” or scroll down/up to what I want (courier)
  6. only to have the box not respond or not respond with the font/command I’ve clicked with my mousepad.

Often, when I select “Recently Used,” instead of it being highlighted/shadow-boxed/selected (however you want to call it) the shadowbox around “ALL FONTS” goes away and the cursor begins blinking at the start of the “ALL FONTS” box, as if I have asked to edit the line. Any attempt to control the commands inside the font box then goes all haywire. If I manually try to scroll through the fonts, the screen is unresponsive; then it jumps several screens at a time. If I try to click from the fonts available on the screen, I can’t control my selection. I click the third font from the top, for example, only to have my text changed into the text that is fifth from the top.

After repeated efforts to work around this tonight, I quit the program, re-started, and was able to change the fonts correctly. The problem has occurred more than once.

2

Hi,

This may suggest a problem with something on your computer, given that the Show Fonts panel is part of the OS X text system rather than specific to Scrivener. The way to check would be to see if the same thing happens in TextEdit, as that uses the same Show Fonts panel. If it happens there, too, then there must be a font problem on your machine. (Have you disabled any fonts, for instance? Disabling fonts can cause all sorts of problems on OS X, even though it shouldn’t in theory.) Given that it doesn’t happen every time, it would take a bit of TextEdit use to check, though - or at lease you would have to try to do exactly the same thing in TextEdit as you are doing in Scrivener (recent fonts with the same imported Word doc etc).

The other thing to check is whether anything gets output to the console when you see this error. Next time it occurs, open up Console.app from ~/Applications/Utilities and see if there is an error referring to Scrivener printed out there (note that I accidentally left some debugging code in Scrivener 1.11, so you will see some stuff about paragraph formatting on the console which is harmless).

Let me know how you get on.

Thanks and all the best,
Keith