Scrivener Windows a different format than Scrivener Mac?

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
1

After setting up Scrivener on my windows PC I came to discover that some of the formatting was different such as the font style which was originally Cochin on my Mac but changed to Arial on Windows, it doesn’t appear that I can even select Cochin from the drop down menu in Windows Scrivener. After doing some research I saw that Windows doesn’t even have Cochin due to licensing rights if I’m not mistaken, why is that? Should I expect to find any of my other formatting changed? I have about 30k words and am having trouble eyeing things that may be different due to the volume of words I’m searching through. Is their a font that can be used that is similar to Cochin and is it possible to change all of the text I have written to that font at the same time?

2

Scrivener doesn’t embed the fonts (for licensing reasons, I would imagine), so it depends on the fonts being on each system. If the font isn’t on your system, then Scrivener chooses a substitute (Arial in this case).

You’ll have to find one that you like that is on both systems. Cochin is a serif font, so you’ll want to look at similar ones. If you’re not too fussy about your fonts, then Times New Roman is on both Windows and Mac as far as I know, so that could be one to try — but there are many others which you can choose to suit your taste.

I assume you’re using Version 2 on the Mac and I can’t remember the exact menu configuration, but the basic steps you need are (on the Mac)

  1. Change the default font (I think it’s in Editing in Preferences) to Times New Roman etc
  2. In the binder, select all the documents you want to change then choose Documents > Convert > Convert to default text formatting (the wording may be different, but it’s obvious…)
  3. A dialogue box comes up allowing you to specify which changes you want — when you press Enter, all your documents will have Times New Roman as the font.

Now when you open the project in Windows, it should show Times New Roman.

The process in step 2-3 can’t be undone (except by redoing it with another font of course), so I’d create a test document to try it out first so you understand what’s going on with the various options. The process is really robust though, so you shouldn’t have any problems.

HTH.