Some Unicode doesn’t seem to work when I paste it in. For example, if I paste in Chinese characters, it works fine. But I’ve been trying to put in Sanskrit text, and it shows up as a series of black squares. I even tried putting it directly into the RTF files, and while they look correct in there, they still show as black squares once opened in Scrivener. Any ideas?
The obvious question is whether the font you’re using in Scrivener has those characters.
Well the font shows the characters fine in MS Word.
Perhaps you could paste some Sanskrit into a reply here? We’d see how Scriv takes it pasted in from a browser.
Rgds – Jerome
This is the text I was trying to paste in: तन्त्र;
In case this helps anyone else, it looks fine in my browser, and pastes fine into Libre Office writer, which tells me the font is mangal which I don’t have on my system and could not select.
I get exactly the same black boxes as jvaran when pasting into Scrivener (both with and without match styles) and it keeps my Georgia font. The font seems to paste just fine from the black boxes into Scrivener’s character map applet.
I did find the font set for free at: http://indiatyping.com/index.php/download/hindi-fonts
But I do not know if they are legit or not and have never downloaded anything from them.
As another data point, they paste into Scrivener with no problems on the Mac. The font is identified as Kohinoor Devanagari (one of the default Mac fonts).
A quick web search suggests that you can get variants of this free: free-fonts.com/kohinoor-devanagari which might be worth trying.
Do note, when copying and pasting from a web page, we are only copying the unicode characters (U+0924 U+0928), NOT the “font”. It is up to the operating system to do the correct font substitutions. The problem sounds like the Scrivener editor component is not finding the right code points for this substitution range, and this sounds like a bug in editor component Scrivener uses. Again, even if you select a font that doesn’t support a unicode character, the OS should find a font which does and substitutes just for those characters — you think you are using font X but behind the scenes a substitution has occurred…
AND font substitution is really complex (+buggy unicode tables in fonts and buggy OS issue), and it may be that downloading some other fonts that support the unicode range U+0900 to U+0979 may help. Arial Unicode MS for sure has this code range, and you should easily find it for download online (version is V1.0.1, it is microsoft licenced but comes with most of their apps).
EDIT: SIL open source fonts are seriously designed and technically always great; they have a modern, well designed Devanagari script font that is freely licenced: software.sil.org/annapurna/