Select System Font in Settings

[Marko]

Hallo,

is there a way to select the System Font (San Francisco, I believe) in the settings for various types of fonts used in Scrivener, short of resetting to default settings?

Plus, can I select this font for things that don’t default to the System Font?

Thanks a lot.

[ScriverTid]

is there a way to select the System Font (San Francisco, I believe) in the settings for various types of fonts used in Scrivener, short of resetting to default settings?

Plus, can I select this font for things that don’t default to the System Font?

When you select the fonts list, is San Francisco not in there? My OS doesn't have this, but its System Font is Lucida Grande which IS in the Fonts lists.

You just set fonts for various different areas in the relevant section in Preferences - most of them you set in the Formatting tab.

[ScriverTid]

is there a way to select the System Font (San Francisco, I believe) in the settings for various types of fonts used in Scrivener, short of resetting to default settings?

Plus, can I select this font for things that don’t default to the System Font?

When you select the fonts list, is San Francisco not in there? My OS doesn't have this one - my System Font is Lucida Grande which IS in the Fonts lists.

You just set fonts for various different areas in the relevant section in Preferences - most of them you set in the Formatting tab.

[xiamenese]

is there a way to select the System Font (San Francisco, I believe) in the settings for various types of fonts used in Scrivener, short of resetting to default settings?

Plus, can I select this font for things that don’t default to the System Font?

When you select the fonts list, is San Francisco not in there? My OS doesn't have this, but its System Font is Lucida Grande which IS in the Fonts lists.

You just set fonts for various different areas in the relevant section in Preferences - most of them you set in the Formatting tab.

Different version of System, @ScriverTid. San Francisco came in as a system font round about 10.10 or 10.11—probably when the Retina screens first appeared on Macs—for menus etc. but it is not normally accessible for other purposes, so it doesn't appear in Font Book, for instance. Its many variants are located in Macintosh HD/System/Library/Fonts but I seem to remember reading somewhere that the system EULA does not allow for it to be used for any other purposes. I may be wrong and others may well know better.

Mark

[Cinder6]

It's kind of frustrating that Apple doesn't let users easily select San Francisco. Even if you pull it out of /Library, San Francisco is actually a whole suite of fonts that are dynamically chosen based on application.

[nontroppo]

Apple are using SF for all their branding, they do not want you to use it for yours. This is why they do not let you select SF...

I had the same problem with Athelas, which is a non selectable system font (used in iBooks). I ended up having to hack the OTF file font table names using a friends Glyphs editor app to allow me to load them and for them to be visible in macOS. You could do the same for SF (there are some open source font editing apps).

[Cinder6]

Athelas is a bit different. Apple's license for the font simply doesn't allow them to use it in contexts outside of iBooks. Same with Iowan and Seravek.

The strange thing is that some apps do allow you to use and select San Francisco as a font. It would seem to be possible for Scrivener, then.

[xiamenese]

Interestingly, I do have access to Athelas in my font book, but not Iowan or Seravek. Athelas is also on my font list on Nisus Writer Pro and Scrivener. I wonder if I moved it to one of the other /Library/Font/ folders at some point. It's a nice font, I think, but not so different that I want to use it instead of AGP or any of the others I use from time to time.

Mark

[nontroppo]

Cinder: you are probably correct that Athelas is only partially licenced, but SF certainly doesn't have that problem Which apps allow you to use SF?

Mark: strange, I had moved the files to every conceivable location and macOS Font Book/Apps never acknowledged them. Yeah, my infatuation with Athelas was due to one main reason: Th ligature

Screen Shot 2017-08-23 at 23.10.44.png (5.31 KiB) Viewed 3662 times

Fonts without a Th ligature annoy me! I know this is not a standard ligature, but the collision of the h ascender with the top bar of the T and the IMO excess space between them distracts me.

My absolute favourite serif of all time, Dolly, also uses Th ligatures, along with other fancy things like contextual ampersands:

Screen Shot 2017-08-23 at 23.33.09.png (280.53 KiB) Viewed 3662 times

This is my font test document, I need proper unicode sub/superscript numbers and greek character support without ugly substitutions, and I love characterful ampersands (see how A & B in Dolly gets a special &)! Athelas and Dolly handles these demands well, where other serifs fail in one or another way.

[AmberV]

And by the way, the main reason I came here before getting distracted in an orgy of typography, is to mention that 3.0 will have a System Font selector in contexts like preferences, so you can get back to the SF font if you experiment with something else for a while.

[Cinder6]

Cinder: you are probably correct that Athelas is only partially licenced, but SF certainly doesn't have that problem Which apps allow you to use SF?

I was thinking several allow you to select it, but now that I think more, I only know of one for sure (Ulysses). Others just use it and don't let you select anything else.

San Francisco is a nice system font, but I'm not a big fan of reading (or writing) long text in it. For that, I prefer Iowan on high-resolution displays.

Dolly is, indeed, a nice font.

[nontroppo]

AmberV: — Calluna is lovely too, it has a beautiful humanist e (I hate neo-classical serifs where the e and a is forced into a horizontal axis), other fonts by the same designer are also really nice. Regarding Dolly, I have done quite a bit of customisation (it didn't have a greek character set for example!), but the Th is definitely in there.

Cinder6: interesting that Ulysses team figured out a way to do that, though I agree that SF is not a writing font, it is an OS interface font (and IMO not the best, Fira as pointed out above is much more interesting, yet still handles interfaces well)

[ScriverTid]

On the subject of fonts, does anyone know if there is such a font as this:

aBcDeFGHiJKLmnoPQrsTuvwxYz

Basically, it hasn't come out too well on here because uppercase is so much bigger than lower case - what I'm after is a font that uses lower case unless there is a vertical (upper as in b or lower as in j ), in which case it uses the capital form, but exactly the same height and width as the lower case. End result? Every letter is the same height except the i has its dot and the Q has its loop.

[derick]

I have somehow managed to get San Francisco to appear in my recent fonts in the font panel, though it's not on the main list of fonts. And it's only on one of my Macs, not the other. I fiddled with a bit but haven't been able to replicate it. Too bad, b/c I quite like it as a writing font.

[nontroppo]

ScriverTid: never heard of such a fixed-height via mixed-case font — opentype would surely be able to do it so it is possible, just not probable!

derick: possibly you used an app like Ulysses that does somehow overcome Apple's obfuscation on that one machine?