I love Scrivener, I’m set aback by the ugly font rendering on the editor (the rest of the interface looks okay). See screenshot: i.imgur.com/5MySPXg.png
Cropped screenshot (see the difference between rest of the interface (left), with good font rendering, and the editor (right), with poor rendereng):
Is there a way to fix this?
I’ve tried adding a .fonts.conf and setting the antialiasing there (I’m using slight hinting with rgba antialiasing on the rest of the system, so I’ve configured the same on the .fonts.conf). Here’s my .fonts.conf: pastebin.com/ej0UjPq2
I’ve tried all antialiasing possibilities on the .fonts.conf, with out without antialiasing, with or without .fonts.conf… I’ve also tried many fonts that look fine on any other application, and in the Scrivener editor they always look ugly.
I’m using the latest Linux version of Scrivener on the latest Ubuntu with Gnome Shell.
I hope there’s a way to fix this, because the rest of Scrivener is great, it deserves an equally great font rendering Thanks!
Is it for all your fonts, or just that one? Some fonts are better quality than others and you might have luck with another one.
Other than that, I’m at a loss. I know it’s not helpful when someone posts “I don’t see this behavior” but I don’t. The fonts I use display fine.
What distro are you running? If you’re running fedora, there are howtos for improving font rendering generally through the OS that might also affect the editor window.
Font rendering isn’t acceptable under Windows either. I’m still not able to use Scrivener as a primary app. Might just be I’m some sort of ocd jerk when it comes to the aesthetics of my tools, but I can get noticeably better font rendering from a freeware text editor that uses Qt just as Scrivener does or another that uses the default .NET renderer, so it doesn’t seem far fetched to just get the runtime environment to provide better rendering with little effort. If you want to really make Scrivener look shabby, grab SublimeText and give it a spin. I’m not sure how it does on Linux, but under Windows, if you set the custom renderer to DirectWrite, it can make pretty much any font at any size look gorgeous. Now I’m not suggesting that the L’n’L go through the effort to custom roll a font rendering engine, but there’s got to be something in the Qt framework that will do the job well enough to get to the point where rendering falls off the list of issues.
Have you checked the fonts after compiling? While you work on a project you can use comic sans in 24 point if you want to - but it won’t matter unless you compile it “as is”.
When I first started using Scrivener I was obsessed with fonts and formatting until I realized that the compiler will correct everything into a uniform output.
My advice is to take a few minutes (or an hour or two) and play around with the project formatting and the compiler.
Its not about Scrivener failing to render print fonts well enough onscreen. Its a failure to render any of a number of fonts I like to use, onscreen, as I compose, that render perfectly well in pretty much any other editor. Actually, the more effort I put in to trying to use Scrivener, the greater the difference in render quality appears. Eye strain and reading fatigue are big factors for me, factors that had all been handily addressed by other solutions that I have onhand. I don’t think its unreasonable for Scrivener, an application that encourages a writer to basically live within it, to be more accommodating toward the writers that use it, and find it hard to believe that very few others can see what I see, especially given that the mods use it to write, obviously, and the coders are, well, coders, who live and work with screens full of text that ideally should be rendered well enough for comfort.
I’ve found that font hinting can make a big difference, either “on” or “off”.
Go to menu “Tools/Options/Editor” – look for the “Use Font Hinting” checkbox in the Editor Options pane.
Also, sometimes the percentage of onscreen display, i.e. 80%, 100%, 120%, etc. can make a big difference on my screen. Some percentages do not display well.
More significantly, some distro/desktop versions vary widely. IMHO this is one of the weaker areas of desktop linux.
Thanks!