I write a lot, in different places and systems. Currently I have a Mac Mini and a Windows PC in my office, a Mac Mini and a Windows PC in my sitting room (who doesn’t like to work in comfort sometimes?) and a MacBook Air and Windows Laptop for when I’m working in other locations. I also have OneDrive and iCloud for transfers and working between systems. (Dropbox just never works for me)
So, to expand on my question – if I switch between Mac and Windows with the same file, will I hit any formatting or font issues? Will any styles change, or break?
It may seem a strange question, but I’ve written several novels in other software and the font issues are very apparent when I switch between platforms. The best they can suggest is that I choose fonts that exist on both, but I use their default fonts, so why didn’t they already think of that?
I know PA relies on ‘styles’ for headers and paragraphs, so has anyone experienced any problems switching a file across platforms/systems that caused font or formatting glitches?
I’m not worried about the final product (I use Vellum for that) as long as you can tell it to output a standard DocX file with no multiple fonts all over the place, but I don’t like issues when I just want to write.
Do you work with a single Papyrus file stored in the cloud, that you always open with the computer you’re using, or do you have multiple WIPs?
The versions of Papyrus Author are essentially identical on macOS and Windows, so the document will look the same on both - minus the device-specific customization you might have (display settings, etc.).
This is interesting. So the fonts available are different on macOS and Windows? It may be, that the fonts in question are installed locally on one of your computers, but not on the others. Do you have an example font in mind, that caused this sort of an issue?
The solution could be to install the font to the other device as well. Here’s guides on macOS and Windows:
I’m a full-time author, several pen names, writing constantly except when my wife forces me to take a break.
I have multiple projects, but only one cloud copy for each. I usually work from OneDrive, syncing locally on each system, carefully, before working. The Mac version of OneDrive sometimes needs a restart to force a sync, probably a bug, but I watch for it by checking timestamps.
The multiple platform issue only arose because a certain piece of software I’d used for maybe 15 years stopped being produced on Mac and the alternatives just didn’t work well. Hence I bought the PCs a few years ago.
Great. So as long as I make no specific customisations it’ll look the same. That’s what I need.
Yes, the other software people said something similar, but surely their default styles should just use the same font on both systems? Made sense to me anyway, but apparently not to them.
I can search for and install some of the fonts, but the damage was done as soon as I opened the Windows file on Mac and it asked me to choose a new font because it didn’t have their ‘Windows default’ available.
I’ll run some experiments with PA this weekend and see what happens. Thanks.
Thanks.