Today I sent my mac scriv project to a friend who has the win ver but she couldn’t open it? We tried opening from Scrivener’s file menu and also by clicking from the folder. I’ve read that the mac and win versions are compatible for moving the project x-platform - am I missing something?
EDIT: I forgot to mention, it’s only possible work cross-platform with Scrivener 2 on the Mac. If you’re using a 1.x version, the project format is not compatible with Windows, so you would need to first upgrade the project to 2.x before sending it to Windows.
The problem you’re seeing is usually the result of a sync conflict if you’re using (or have previously used) something like Dropbox to share the project. Conflicted files within the project, especially if it has resulted in multiple .scrivx files, can prevent Scrivener on Windows from opening a project (even if it opens properly in the Mac version).
You can check on this and fix it pretty simply. Make a zipped backup of the project’s whole .scriv folder as a safety precaution, and then remove the extraneous “so-and-so’s conflicted copy” file or files from the project folder. (If you’re doing this on the Mac, you’ll need to right-click the .scriv file and choose “Show Package Contents”.) I recommend just moving the conflicted files to somewhere outside of the project rather than deleting them, in case it turns out you need something from them. You can always import any conflicted text files into the project after you open it so you can compare them side by side with the current version.
Note that you might have multiple .scrivx project files in the .scriv folder, even if they don’t have that “conflicted” name; they’re still going to cause a problem, so you’ll want to remove all but the most recent. The name it uses isn’t important; Windows always creates the project file as “project” and the Mac version will name it according to the .scriv container name. (So if the project is “MyNovel.scriv”, opening that up and looking at the contents would reveal “project.scrivx” if this were a Windows-only project but “MyNovel.scrivx” if the project had last been saved on a Mac.) You might not see the “.scrivx” part of the filename, but the file will have a Scrivener project icon.
A conflict like this can happen if you shut off the computer’s network connection before Dropbox has finished syncing or if you open the project before Dropbox has completed syncing changes made on another computer. Guidelines for using a sync service are covered in the “Scrivener Everywhere” chapter of the user manual and in this knowledge base article. There’s of course always the possibility of a glitch with any syncing service, but following the guidelines outlined there will help minimise errors.
Great reply! I’ll look into this and report back…