[LH3575] Win 10 Beta vs Mac formatting

Scrivener Windows Beta (Archived)
1

Hi,

I use OSX at home, a Surface Go for on the go, editing the same project linked through DB. The formatting should be the same between the two, but Windows displays extra lines after returns. I attached two screenshots.

Is this a view setting I can change somewhere? I do all the compiling on a mac, so it’s not an issue when time comes, but it just looks much worse when I’m writing on windows :slight_smile:

osx.png windows.png

2

If you want the devs to see this, you should post it in the Windows Beta forum or PM a mod to move it.

3

Will do - thank you!

4

That is not a look that would happen under normal use of the paragraph spacing settings, under Format ▸ Paragraph ▸ Line and Paragraph Spacing…. But maybe there is some combination of settings in there that produce this effect. The other good tool to be aware of when looking at stuff like this is View ▸ Text Editing ▸ Show Invisibles.

P.S. Already moved to the correct forum.

5

Thanks for the replies.

It doesn’t seem to be related to some hidden characters. If I copy and paste it into something like TextWranger or open a file using vi in the terminal, it looks like on the mac. Just lines with tab’s indenting new paragraphs but no extraneous spacing, so I tend to believe it’s something with rendering in windows. I should also say it looks correct on iOS.

6

Tab indented paragraphs may indeed be the culprit. Firstly, I should mention that in general it’s not a good idea to do that outside of plain-text—it’s the kind of thing publishers have macros to clean out of submitted manuscripts, on account of the mess they can make later on—and in fact Scrivener has a command for doing that as well: Edit ▸ Text Tidying ▸ Strip Leading Tabs. Using first-line indents on the Ruler is the preferred mechanism, and indeed that is one place where tabs can come back to bite you: you can end up with “double width” indents when the paragraph is indented during final formatting along with the tab.

That alone wouldn’t explain the discrepancy however. My guess is that on the Mac you’ve got your Ruler set up to use a default tab stop interval (rather than having a bunch of explicit stops on the Ruler)—a feature not yet fully implemented on Windows last I checked. So on the Mac you hit tab and the cursor jumps over to 1cm or whatever, but on Windows it finds no explicit tab stop and jumps to the next line—thus every paragraph starts with a pseudo-line break.

So if my guess is close to the mark, either of these should help:

  • Add an explicit tab stop to your default ruler settings, and update the formatting on existing documents.
  • Preferably: use Format ▸ Paragraph ▸ Tabs and Indents…, and set the First line setting to your preferred “tab stop” on the default ruler. Then use the aforementioned command to strip out the unnecessary physical tabs.
7

This is a bug with the Windows Beta and has been filed. I’ve updated the title with the ticket number.

Thanks!

8

Thank you for filing the bug report!

But also thank you AmberV for the wealth of information! I will try the steps you’ve listed for now, as well as follow the advice to not use tabs for the reasons you’ve listed.