Please Please Please get a new font#778

I love every single feature and piece of Arc more than any other program. As an Ipad user, its like a gift from heaven. But the fonts are just not nice to look at. Will there ever be an option to use our own font within the program or give access to a wider range of fonts?

Absolutely mission critical. Let us use Courier Final Draft or any other font we choose.

Just posted about the same issue. Concerining no action has been taken.

I see requests for this going back 2 years, in a closed chat. I fear this will never be addressed.

With the closing of the user forums, I feel like they’re not very interested in our feedback anymore. Maybe they’re more focused on their other app, the Google Docs competitor – it has a bigger market than screenwriting.

Hey Mike, thanks for the candid note. Closing the forums could have sent the wrong signal: it wasn’t about prioritizing other apps or de-prioritizing feedback. We simply decided to focus on events and videos as these worked much better for our specific community. Arc Studio remains our top priority and the requests here absolutely shape our roadmap. On this specific item, I haven’t been able to find the root cause yet. I’ll update this thread as it progresses – we’re working hard to deliver a great experience!

On this specific item, I haven’t been able to find the root cause yet.

Seems like the root cause is that your desktop app doesn’t connect to the font system provided by the OS. The fonts are hard-wired into the app, which is not best practice for either Mac or Windows.

Closing the forums could have sent the wrong signal

You could remedy this by reopening the forum and sending an invitation to all registered users. If Discourse is too expensive for your operating budget, you can install Flarum, which is free and open source https://flarum.org

IMHO, one of the keys to creating raving fans for your product is to provide a place for users to help each other and share their delight. A strong user community can be a valuable asset to a software company. I hope Arc Studio reinstates a place for all users to gather.

We do offer the option to use System Courier font in the app, but this doesn’t fix the issue on Windows, unfortunately. My current understanding is that this is a font rendering issue in Chromium on Windows (in Firefox it looks much better on my end, maybe you can confirm if the fonts look crisper in Firefox?)

Thanks for the flarum tip! The issue isn’t the Discourse fee, though. Micah invested a lot of time into getting the community started – I totally agree that an active community is very valuable – but people were more active in the events, so we’re focusing there. I really recommend the Let’s Write Scripts sessions, they are a great way to connect with us and other writers. Of course, adding feedback here is also great – we’re actively monitoring and adjusting our roadmap based on it!

Hi, there. In your answer above, you mention the font rendering in Chromium is an issue. I’m experiencing the thin font in the Windows app version, not in a browser. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding? Oh, and please just give us a better font. Pretty please.

Yes, I’m using the MacOS app, not the browser version. On the Mac, ArcStudio does not offer the fonts from the OS, it has a small number of fonts bundled in the app, and is calling those.

If Arc on MacOS called the OS font system, we’d have access to Courier Final Draft and any other font already installed on our machines.

Interesting. The Windows version does let you use what it calls the Windows default courier. But that font is even thinner, and there’s no way I could find to fool the program into thinking a different font is the windows default. Even tried a ChatGPT registry hack, but no luck.;

Though of a perhaps obvious workaround for the thin font…. It’s not ideal, but it works. Select all the text in your doc and bold it all. The fonts in the windows version are extremely legible. Then select all text again before outputting, and turn bold off. There are two downsides to this. If you want some words bolded in your outputted draft, you will have to go back when you’re done, turn off bold for all text, then bold just those words. Also, some people may find the bold too thick and kind of ugly to look at for an entire document.

Of course a fix to this known problem would be the better alternative, but at this point I assume the developers lack the impetus to do so, or the resources to go back into the code and change it.