Windows to MacOS (Scrivener 3) Migration Styling Issues

(I’m not sure whether this is a Mac Scrivener problem or a Windows Scrivener problem, so I went for the generic Scrivener category.)

Hey! So. I recently tried to migrate my Scrivener projects from Windows to Mac. Zipped them up in Windows, opened them back up in Mac. Both Scrivener 3.

Unfortunately, that completely wrecked my custom styles. Not just the styles themselves, because in that case it’d have been really easy to update it all, but the assignment of style per paragraph. Somehow, transferring my projects to macOS literally scrambled the paragraph styling.

And it’s inconsistent; from what I can tell, there’s no clear pattern to it. Like, in Windows, I might have two paragraphs, one styled as “Wiki Text Body” and another styled as “Wiki Header 1”. In Mac, it might all be “Wiki Text Body” or all “Wiki Header 1“ or even a different style altogether, like ”Wiki Header 2”.

Worse still, even when it seems the styles were imported correctly (at least their assignments, even if the fonts and sizes are wrong), when I try to use “update a style from selection” over in Mac in an attempt to fix the font, it just updates that specific paragraph (or a handful of them) and not all the other paragraphs assigned that same style, as if they were different styles.

Now, I still have access to my projects on Windows, so what I want to know is if there’s anything I can tweak on my Windows projects before migrating them to Mac that might ensure the styles are properly retained. I’d be perfectly happy to fix them in Windows, zip them up and transfer them over again. Because I’m really not looking forward to individually restyling well over ten thousand files, each with several levels of headers, across more than twenty different projects.

I also did some tests and found, interestingly, that this is only an issue when you move from Windows to macOS. I’ve tried moving a project I restyled in macOS back to Windows, even directly moving one of the restyled files from the Mac import to the original Windows project, and all of it worked perfectly; the styles perfectly matched, no issues whatsoever.

Any help would be monumentally appreciated, because I’m seriously considering just sticking to Scrivener on Windows, even though one of the main reasons why I bought a new Mac was to use the best version of Scrivener. What’s worse is that, my problems importing projects aside, Scrivener on Mac runs so much more smoothly and looks so much better, so I’d really prefer to use it over there. But, again, I’m just not willing to spend literally dozens of hours restyling all my files.

Something to try, off the top of my head (never tested, never even heard of it) :

Perhaps try creating a blank new project, then importing the styles to it, and finally importing the project to it – a version never even opened in Scrivener for Mac ?

. . . . . . .

On the other hand I’d say this is something you’d want the support team to look into.
You may contact them directly here :

Likely they already know the answer. Else, I’m sure they’ll want to investigate this.

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Thanks! Tried out your suggestion, but unfortunately the styles are still scrambled. Did reach out to support, though; awaiting a reply. Again, thanks!

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Shot in the dark: I wonder if these styles are specifying a typeface that is available on your Win, but not on your Mac. You mention that your styled paragraphs do not show up with their intended font. I don’t see how a missing font could lead to all the pathology you indicate, but something to look into anyway — as in what happens when you make sure the specified fonts are avail on your Mac?

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Right. So. I actually ended up reaching out to Support; apparently the issue is with the current version of Mac on Scrivener; I imported the projects to a previous Mac Scrivener version (3.4.4); there, the styles weren’t scrambled; I then did a search and replace of a specific regex string as instructed, and then opened the projects in the latest Mac Scrivener version, and the style assignments remained unscrambled.

It was something related to hidden characters from styling in Windows, from what I understand, as well as how the current version of Mac Scrivener interprets them.

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