I returned to Scrivener after several months of break.
I upgraded to recent version and have now strong impression that fonts are not nicely rendered or ant-aliased and looks ugly.
Preferences seems to be quite complex so I will probably spend more time to fit it to my needs.
So I want to ask you for experience: what kind of font you use for writing in editor screen. Optima looks ugly. I am not sure what is better readable : serif or sans-serif fonts or maybe monospaced?
I am intresting to hear your remarks also, I saw many of your screenshots. Is there any repository for Scrivener Themes created by community? would be nice to see
You won’t find much in Scrivener involving the rendering of fonts, as this is handled by your Mac. In other words if you copy and paste some text out of Scrivener and into TextEdit, it should look pretty much identical. There is one option in the Editor preferences pane, “Use fine kerning”, which can impact readability. This adjusts the amount of spacing between letter combinations, and has nothing to do with the drawing of the letters themselves, or their aliasing, so if you have ugly pixels this won’t help you. That’s probably something you need to check the settings for in the main OS X System Preferences. The most likely suspect would be the “General” panel (called “Appearance” in older versions). At the very bottom you’ll find options for LCD font smoothing and when to switch anti-aliasing off. It is possible to set anti-aliasing to be disabled for fairly large screen fonts, so if that got set unusually high, it could make a mess of things in any standard Mac program.
As for which font is best, well that is entirely subjective. I quite like Optima, for instance, but I tend to prefer monospace fonts because I write using MultiMarkdown and variable width fonts sometimes diminish the appearance of important glyphs such as square brackets and asterisks. I need those clear and obvious. My advice would be to load up Font Book and just go through the fonts you have available on your system. Using the [b]Preview/Custom[/b] view mode, you can paste in some sample text to get a better idea of what it will look like in Scrivener.
The conclusion is that, among mainstream typefaces, it probably doesn’t matter. Just pick one that you like.
I personally use Optima, but that’s as much because Scrivener came set up that way as anything.
I do intensely dislike monospace fonts. Since almost everything I read is variable width, monospace seems to make it harder to see the breaks between words. But YMMV.
Thank You girls . I will give it a look. You were right, I have disabled font-aliasing in System Preferences. I see if changing that helps.
Still I am curious if there are any nice visual styles for Scriveners designed by authors - would be worth checking
I find Cochin to be very easy on the eyes, but I would agree that it’s 99% subjective. Play around with a large patch of text and see that looks good for you.
