I'm fairly new to Scrivener (I've owned it for a long time just never gotten around to the writing projects I want to do and I've been getting into it more lately). Hello, Firstly thanks for the detailed reply. You could make something that performs almost as well as Scrivener in about 15 minutes of coding.

It's text engine is very high quality for being a free kit anyone can use. I wouldn't recommend any other way-we spend most of our effort on writing tools rather than desktop publishing tools-but for those that don't need something that looks like it came out of Harper Collins press, then the Mac is an objectively better platform to do that from.

But I use external tools for final typesetting and production. What the text looks like while I am writing has very little to do with its actual formatting when all is said in done. You shouldn't be seeing anything like that, but if you do, let us know!Īs for whether minor differences would compel one to stick to one platform, I guess that depends on what you intend to use Scrivener for. I am not speaking so much of cases where you set a paragraph to be block indented 2cm and it comes out 1.87cm on Windows. I am speaking more of details here, like how fonts are rendered on the screen, word-wrapping algorithms, hyphenation and so forth. On the PC side we've had to build much of the text engine from scratch, so we have more control, but some things are difficult to emulate even if you know how they should work. It is difficult to get things precisely the same because on the Mac side we use the macOS text engine, which doesn't have all of its inner workings fully documented. With the exception of a few things like fonts (which tend to have platform-specific internal names, making it so that even if you use the same font in both places you can lose the assignment when switching platforms) and maybe bullets (which are in need of repair in the beta), the formatting should be fairly close.

Scrivener for mac vs windows 2016