I hope this hasn’t been answered before. I searched around for an answer and couldn’t find one. I really want to use Scrivener as my writing software, but I’m having a lot of trouble getting the cross compatibility and syncing to work correctly. Specifically, I’m having issues going from Mac to Windows.
I’ve tried using Git (I’m a programmer by trade) and google drive, and Git completely mangled the formatting when I opened the mac project on windows: no spacing at all, all formatting gone.
When I use drive, most of the formatting is ok. However, in both cases, the font on windows is completely wrong.
It’s hard to describe, so here’s a picture of my first graf.
Can anyone tell me what setting is causing this? I tried changing fonts, changing sizes, changing from banner to text, nothing changed it. I tried changing themes, which did not fix it, and syncing also works ok if I change line ending stuff in Git, but Drive worked as well.
I can put up with fixing some line ending stuff as long as the font starts to work ok!
As a first test, use the File → Backup → Backup To command on the Mac to create a ZIP backup of the project. Transfer it to the Windows system by any convenient method, unzip, and open the project in Scrivener.
Neither Git nor Google Drive is supported for use with Scrivener projects; this test bypasses both to confirm that the project itself works correctly (or not) on both systems.
I could just be the way that the two systems handle fonts. I had to muck around with fonts on macOS so that after compiling it came out the way I wanted.
Which OS displays the fonts that way that you want?
When you are ready to compile then use that OS to do the compile so it comes out the way that you like.
I thought that at first as well, but I made a brand new project in Windows and it looks great, so I think it’s doing something in the transfer process, just can’t figure out what.
It’s not actually the compile that’s causing the font problem, that screen shot is of the editor itself, which is very hard to write/read in
The mac is showing the same strange font now when I open from the synced project files, which makes me think something is definitely going on in the sync. I wonder if it might be a setting.
Question: Did you confirm your chosen font exists on both devices?
Something to try: Create the Interactive Tutorial in the sync folder of one of your devices (File > New > Interactive Tutorial); open the tutorial and spot check a few documents, to confirm they look okay; close it; open it on the other device; how does it look?
I made two new projects, synced them via Google Drive, and opened them on separate machines. Both seemed to work well with the correct fonts. I’m betting you’re right that it’s something about the font. Thank you for that insight. It is a relief to have this mostly solved.
Google Drive cannot be trusted with live Scrivener projects. While it is unlikely to be contributing to this specific issue, it is known to cause unrecoverable data loss in some situations. Please choose an alternative service.
The specific issue is that a Scrivener project is a complex object, with sub-folders and potentially hundreds of component files. Google Drive does not respect the integrity of this object, and as a result the various component files might be out of sync with each other. For instance, the master index file might include a reference to a document that hasn’t been uploaded to the Google server (or downloaded to the local machine) yet.
It’s your data, your money, and your choice. Just be aware that you are choosing to do something that we explicitly advise against.
Just be aware that Scrivener sync errors can be insidious. You may not discover a document was damaged until some unknown later date. This scenario makes data recovery tricky, in that you can’t simply restore the entire project; instead, you need to dig around in your project backups for the intact document.
My experience was that the Google Drive app synced inconsistently on Windows: files wouldn’t sync or synced out of sequence; sometimes syncing would just stop. For Scrivener, this is a recipe for disaster. Repairing sync errors is no fun.
So, personally, I would not use Google Drive for syncing my Scrivener projects. But it’s been a few years since I’ve used it. Perhaps Google has improved the Windows app since then.
Hey just wanted to cap the thread off with some good follow up in case someone finds this in the future via google:
The dropbox advice is very, very good. I tested with 3 different projects last night, including importing one, and synced them across both google drive and dropbox. In all cases, the google drive ones had issues. The dropbox projects had no issues.
I still get “This project is in use somewhere else” when I open the files and sync them, but so far I have not run into problems with this.
In the end, just use Dropbox, don’t go your own way. Thank you to kewms and everyone else for your patience as you answered my very dumb questions!
I would recommend enabling the auto-quit option on all relevant computers. You’ll find it in the Scrivener → Preferences → General → Automatic Quit tab.
Be sure to allow adequate time for both upload from the origin system and download to the destination system. There’s a small amount of “processing” delay before new files are actually ready for download from the Dropbox server. You’re more likely to run into this when testing than in actual use, but it’s something to be aware of.
The “project in use” message should go away if you allow a bit more time – I’m guessing that you’re not allowing enough time for the “lock” file to clear – but if it doesn’t you should investigate further.
