Clarification on features

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
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  1. Is the convert documents to default formatting going to be implemented after Windows 1.0 is released?

  2. Been looking at the novel template provided by Scrivener. The Sample MS PDF talks about the ‘Page Settings pane’ in the compile window. As it is not in the current Windows release, is this a Mac 2.0 feature, and can we expect it in the Windows version at some point?

  3. The compile options. I understand that compile has been revamped with more options in Mac 2.0. Will those be available in the Windows version at some point? There is nothing in the roadmap that talks about adding compile features.

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On the last two questions, the answer is basically yes. The ultimate goal is to get both programs running at full parity. Realistically this probably won’t be possible for each and every feature. There are some things on the Mac that Scrivener is taking advantage of that would otherwise be hard to reproduce from scratch or even with the use of toolkits (which tend to be expensive), like a grammar checker, or the ability to look up any word in a full copy of the Oxford American English dictionary & thesaurus. These are barely even Scrivener features, in the sense that anyone with a little coding experience could write a simple text editor that does full grammar and integrated dictionary lookup in about 15 minutes. They are just a part of all Mac programs—in fact you have to turn them off specifically, in most cases, if anything.

So putting aside things like Services (which allow you to funnel data from application to application), advanced OpenType typography, and other things that just come along with the Mac “for free”, I think it is fair to say most anything else can be replicated, given enough time. Things like Page Settings (which let you set up paper margins and headers & footers): definitely.

And on the flip side, there will undoubtedly be things that can be done on Windows that are not as easy to do on a Mac. One example that already exists are ghost notes. This was originally a Mac feature, but had to be stripped out due to performance issues in the text editor, it along with some other things were causing prohibitive amounts of typing lag in newer version of the Mac OS. So it’ll go both ways, I have no doubt.

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Thanks for answering Ioa.