I’m a long time Scrivener user on Windows and today a MacBook joined my “staff”.
Installing scrivener and adding a license worked without problems and my project - started with Windows months ago - opened flawlessly.
But I noticed a few differences which may come from different OS (I am sure, they do), so I have to ask how to resolve them:
On Windows I use a lot of shortcuts to replace complicated words (like Kms for Kommissar) or my known typos (like nciht for nicht).
On Mac I miss the point to enter my replacements. How can I do that?
On Windows I use Cambria font within the editor. On Mac it shows up as Helvetica.
I read about problems displaying Fonts between Mac and Win and understand that, but I would prefer Palatino or something else with serife. How can I change that?
Even worse: reopening the “Helvetica”-styled scenes in Win, they are all changed to Arial …
Is there any chance to fix that?
I have Palatino on both systems, so best idea seems to me to change the font via style panel.
But is there a way to apply this to the whole project without selecting each scene one by one?
When using this great little language tool which Win is missing at all, where I can hilight nouns, verbs, adverbs … nothing happens with “speech”. I use intelligent quotes in french style (chevrons). How can I solve this?
Thanks a lot for guiding me. I started working on Macintosh in 1986, but since 1995 I work only on Windows, and the world has changed since then …
Substitutions such as you’re talking about are either system-wide, set through System Preferences > Keyboard > Text pane. Or use an app like Typinator or similar (more expensive) or I use a-Text (£5.99), not that I use it much.
Macs don’t have Calibri installed, but if you have Word, I think it gets installed. But setting your default “No Style” text—as well as all the things which in Windows you set through Options—is in Scrivener > Preferences > Editing > Formatting pane.
I seem to remember AmberV sending you links to support articles about font issues and other “gotchas”.
Substitutions such as you’re talking about are either system-wide, set through System Preferences > Keyboard > Text pane. Or use an app like Typinator or similar (more expensive) or I use a-Text (£5.99), not that I use it much.
Macs don’t have Calibri installed, but if you have Word, I think it gets installed. But setting your default “No Style” text—as well as all the things which in Windows you set through Options—is in Scrivener > Preferences > Editing > Formatting pane.
There is in the support pages on the website an article about “gotchas”, i.e. differences including questions with fonts.
I read about problems displaying Fonts between Mac and Win and understand that, but I would prefer Palatino or something else with serife. How can I change that?
There is a help file on quick font and formatting adjustments that should be of help with this. My own preferences for writing fonts change over time, and so I often find myself updating old projects as I go. It’s pretty painless! I use it often enough to create a custom shortcut. A little trick there, once you use that command once and set up the panel the way you generally prefer, if you use the command a second time with the Option key held down, it will bypass the panel and just fix your text. So if you add Option to your keyboard shortcut (I use ⇧⌥⌘D) then that behaviour carries over—hence you can just hit the shortcut and instantly be up to date.
You could also install Office to get these fonts (I’m not sure if there is a legal way to get them otherwise, there may be on Microsoft’s website), but I’d take a look at the options you have built-in on the Mac as well. Apple does a good job of licensing professional fonts, to a degree that you would probably have to spend many thousands of dollars to acquire on your own.
In my experience most these of these Office fonts work fine between systems, so does Palatino though.
When using this great little language tool which Win is missing at all, where I can hilight nouns, verbs, adverbs … nothing happens with “speech”. I use intelligent quotes in french style (chevrons). How can I solve this?
Do you have your quote style set up correctly in System Preferences: Keyboard: Text? That is the setting Scrivener will use for its own smart quotes of course, and also to inform which parts of the text should be highlighted.
Thanks especially to AmberV for your kind answers.
I managed to install Cambria on the Macbook, but now I run into a strange problem:
Whenever switching from PC to Mac, the font is styled italic.
I can change that via style format for the style called “Absatz”, but it doesn’t work with the other style called “Absatz 1” which is exactly the same as “Absatz”, the only difference is that there is no text intend and “next style” is “Absatz”.
This crazy style-assign-behavior ist the same on Win and Mac.
Yesterday I corrected everything manually on Win, everything seemed fine. But when opening the project on Mac today, everything was italic again.
Do you have an idea what is going wrong there and how to fix it?
I would love to use Cambria on both machines but just for testing purpose I will give Palatino a try.
I don’t know specifically why it is doing that, but in my experience fonts either work cross-platform or they do not, and there isn’t much that can be done about it. As someone that uses Linux, Windows and macOS, font fragility and availability is one of the 1,001 reasons why I write in Markdown and print with LaTeX, instead of rich text and word processors.
If you need some advanced tool for abbreviations (including regular expressions for example) I recommend Typinator which is really great. And it is named after the most famous movie of the most famous Austrian actor(-ish)* because it is an Austrian product. If that matters to you.
* Or would that be Christoph Waltz who also happens to be a real actor?
Typinator is what I’ve used for years on a Mac. It’s a fantastic tool that works well simply, but has a lot of depth to it as well, if you want it. You can build input forms, have per-application abbreviations, make use of the clipboard, generate date stamps, etc.
Lately I’ve switched over to use Espanso because it is cross-platform. It’s lacking in the GUI department (entirely, to be clear, you configure it with text files), and is unabashedly aimed at programmers and such—but it has a lot going for it as well, and it’s nice having text files synced between completely different operating systems so that your expansions are available everywhere.
nothing happens with “speech”. I use intelligent quotes in french style (chevrons). How can I solve this?
