Setting default font

Hello, I have a very easy question, I hope. I work with wymysiöeryś, a language which use a letter ȧ. Unfortunatelly, this letter does not exists in default font used by elan.
I went through entire guidebook and forums, but I couldn’t find the way to change the default font in ELAN. Thus in every single file I have to go to Tier->Change Tier Attributes -> More options -> Tierfont and change it there, what is quite irritating in fact.
I am pretty sure that the answer to my question is easy, but it would help me to save much, much time.
Thanks, Bartek

There is currently no user friendly way of changing the default font for all tiers. This is on the wish list.
If you’re creating a lot of new files it would be best to save one of the files in which you already set the fonts as an ELAN template (.etf) and use that when creating new transcriptions.
If you have to modify a lot of existing transcription files, you could do the following. The font setting is stored in the .pfsx preferences file that is saved alongside each .eaf file. Make a copy of a .pfsx file in which you are sure the font for all relevant tiers has been set. Open that renamed, copied pfsx file in an xml or text editor. Remove all <pref …>…</pref>, <prefList …>…</prefList> and <prefGroup …>…</prefGroup> elements except this one:

<prefGroup key=“TierFonts”> …</prefGroup>

Save it, open an existing eaf file and go to Edit->Preferences->Import Preferences… and select your modified pfsx file. (This only makes sense if you have tiers with the same name in your files.)
If you are not comfortable with xml editing you can send one pfsx file to me (han.sloetjes AT mpi.nl).

-Han

Thanks for this reply, Han. I have many, many ELAN annotation files and suddenly the saltillo (U+A78C) is sometimes displaying properly and often not (it shows up as a box). Following the steps you give here I was able to set the tier font for an individual pfsx file to CharisSIL and this fixes the problem; however, I was wondering if it would be possible to make batch changes to the XML with a BBEdit Multifile Search & Replace using GREP. Is there a place in the XML where this prefGroup must (and can be consistently) be placed? Thx. Kevin

The preferences XML is just a long list of pref, prefList and prefGroup elements, without any specific or consistent order. So if the “TierFonts” prefGroup has to be added, it can be added anywhere in the file (obviously not inside any existing element mentioned above).

Since the post you replied to (from April 2017), a few new options have been added to ELAN that are related to this issue. In case you would like to use the Charis font for all tiers, it is now possible to set an application wide property ELAN.Tiers.DefaultFontName in the elan.properties file.
In case batch updating with e.g. BBEdit would fail or be to complicated, it might also be possible to use the ELAN multiple file Update Transcriptions with Template function (which also copies some of the preferences of the template, if the eaf was actually changed). But care should be taken not to apply unwanted other changes or additions.

-Han