Hi everyone,
I am currently migrating a large project (Scrivener 3) from Windows to macOS. The project contains over 200 linked images stored on Google Drive. While I managed to fix the image paths, I hit a wall regarding the preservation of Paragraph Styles.
Here is the situation:
1. The Image Links (SOLVED) As expected, the absolute paths broke during migration (changing from the Windows G:/... drive mapping to the macOS /Users/... path). I successfully solved this by writing a Python script that iterates through the .scriv package and performs a string replacement in the content.rtf files. The images now appear correctly in the editor.
2. The content.styles Issue (THE PROBLEM) The problem is that modifying the path string length in the RTF file (or even the simple act of migrating platforms) seems to desynchronize the content.styles file. From my analysis, content.styles relies on character offsets/positions to apply formatting. Since the Mac path is significantly longer than the Windows path, the text shifts, and the style map points to the wrong coordinates (or void space), causing Scrivener to revert the text to a wrong style.
Note: I noticed that even before running my Python script, just opening the Windows-created project on macOS shows broken styles in documents that contain images, suggesting a possible binary incompatibility with how the styles are mapped between the two platforms when images are involved.
3. My Question Has anyone successfully migrated a project containing both Linked Images and Applied Styles from Windows to macOS without losing the formatting?
Is there a way to force Scrivener to “re-index” the styles based on the content, or is the only solution to delete the .styles files and re-apply formatting manually on the Mac?
Thanks in advance for any insights!