I am using styles in Scrivener to preserve specific fonts in my compiled manuscript, and the feature is not wholly working. Despite using styles, some fonts work (i.e., get preserved) and others get converted to Times New Roman despite my best efforts. I have spent hours poking around on the web, changing this, changing that, and I am getting nowhere.
Here is what I have. I am using Scrivener 3 on MacOS. In my MS (Novel Format), I have a character who is attempting to decipher an ancient language with very different glyphs from the Latin alphabet. Using a different program (Glyphs Mini), I created my own font for these glyphs, lets call it Ancient Font. Using that font, when I type the letter “K” I get something that looks very different from a standard “K” (e.g., think Wingdings or Webdings.) I added Ancient Font to the OS Font Book, and I can use Ancient Font in Scrivener (and Word) without a problem.
Here is my problem: when I compile, if I use Preserve Formatting, everything shows up exactly how I want. Ancient Font works perfectly in both Word and PDF. But I realized I wanted to change the size of the font (the font size looked odd after compiling), and suddenly I had to go to every single instance in the MS in which I had Ancient Font. Clearly that is a bad solution for something that appears in a lot of different places in the MS.
So I started working on a test section of my MS. I created a style, let’s call it Ancient Style. In Ancient Style, I selected “Include font family” and “Include font size.” The style is set to save character attributes. Despite setting up the style and using it on all my sections of Ancient Font, when I compile everything gets converted to TNR both in Word and in PDF. So, as a test, I selected half of a long string of text in Ancient Style, and marked that as Preserve Formatting. Only the bits that were selected as Preserve Formatting stayed as Ancient Font in the compile. The rest was all converted to TNR.
So, I dug a little longer and thought it might need to flip some switch in compile. I added a new Compile Format to one based on Manuscript(Times) in which I added Ancient Style to the list of styles. At the bottom of the menu, the font settings are correct (Ancient Font, 14pt). When I compiled that to both Word and PDF, it made no difference. It gets converted to TNR.
And here is where things get very strange. I created a second style, Ancient Style 2, but in this style I ditched my cool font. All I did was keep everything in our regular alphabet (English’s standard Latin alphabet), BUT I set the font to Arial Black. When I compile, everything set to Ancient Style 2 comes out Arial Black. Everything set to Ancient Style gets converted to regular TNR—except for the stuff marked Preserve Formatting, which comes out like I want in my cool font.
To view the output, I am creating test files (PDF and Word) and then opening those test files using Preview and Word. I use default style for everything except for the Ancient Font stuff.
Clearly there is something I’m missing. I don’t really think it is a font problem since I can type in it in Scrivener and in Word and it comes out just fine, and if I mark it Preserve Formatting it comes out fine in the compile. Any thoughts?