Hi there, I posted the below in the Mac tech support forum as well, under ‘dropbox’.
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HI there
I am trying to work on my book on both my Mac and my PC machines. At home my iMac is my main machine (except when I am in bed) and away from home my PC laptop is my main machine. I spend about equal time on them.
I have a folder I save to on dropbox and which I access from both computers, making sure that the book is only open on one machine at a time. However the Mac and PC versions of Scrivener do not seem completely compatible with each-other, as evidenced by weird things happening like all the quotation marks disappearing throughout my novel (Yes this happened last night when I opened my project on my PC).
What I would like to know is, is there some sort of compatibility mode I can save in on the Mac to make the Scrivener file 100% compatible with no issues to the PC version? I don’t want to just use external folder sync and Word on my PC, I paid for my Scrivener version on the Mac and I’m planning to pay for the PC version once Nano is over. Right now I’m only working on NanoWriMo but once that’s over I will be preparing a previous novel for publication and won’t be able to risk these sort of problems.
Thanks for your time! Love the program and couldn’t imagine using anything else now that I’m used to it.
Which version of Scrivener for Windows are you using? This is an issue that was addressed in some later betas (after 035) and should be fixed for 1.0, but if you’re still seeing it in 1.0 then please let me know so I can look into this.
There’s not a specific compatibility mode since the two versions are meant to be fully compatible, but if this is still a problem on 1.0, while I look into the matter–which will be due to the RTF encoding from the Mac version producing a character that the Windows version can’t handle–my recommendation would be to use straight quotes instead of smart quotes for both the Mac and Windows versions. Straight quotes should come through without a problem, and you can easily convert them while on the Mac by loading all the documents in a Scrivenings session, then (with the focus in the editor) choosing Format > Convert > Quotes to Straight Quotes. For future writing (for the time being), set the preferences in the Correction tab (Auto-Correction on Windows) not to use smart quotes.
You’ll also want to stick with inline footnotes and annotations when working cross-platform, since Windows doesn’t yet support inspector comments and footnotes.
I’ll try using straight quotes instead of smart quotes, thanks.
Another problem I had, however, was that I was syncing to an external folder as well. I was able to make changes to the rtf in there in Word no problem and the next day I continued writing on my PC in Scrivener from the actual Nano file. When I loaded up the file on my Mac once I got home though, my writing from the day before did not show up! It was as if it went by what was in the sync’d external folder over the actual work files.
I do have my suspicions that it was more to do with Lion’s auto-opening of the most recent document thing than with Scrivener though (that feature has actually been causing me endless problems regardless!)