I’ve been assigned the unenviable task of “editing” (but, I expect, major revising) a 200-page report for readability and consistency in voice; the document will be composed of ten individual reports, crafted as chapters for a main report that I will be responsible for editing. There is also a steering committee who will make changes to the committee chapters before they are passed onto me.
My question is, how can I best work on this document within Scrivener, which is where I work on all my nonfiction writing projects? Should I import the document wholesale into Scrivener using rtf and then divide it into “chunks” to make it manageable? Will any charts or graphs from Word that I import from that same document make the translation into and out of Scrivener?
I figure I have only one solid month to work on the report, starting in mid-June. Much in our organization is at stake with polishing and rewriting this document, so I don’t want to spend a lot of mechanical energy finding out what is the best way to work with it in Scrivener. Do I need to point out that I desperately do NOT want to edit it in Word, which will be the final formatting application?
I would recommend doing some quick tests by importing the document and seeing what comes across. I’ve never tried importing graphs and charts but my guess would be that they won’t come across, as the basic .doc exporter would strip them and I don’t think RTF supports such features (unless they are flattened down to be simple images).
As long as you import as RTF, most other formatting should be preserved, and at that point you could split it up using cmd-K (Documents > Split at Selection) to work on the individual chapters or parts. I imagine the main thing will be checking first how much will get lost and how much work it might take to reincorporate any features (such as graphs) after exporting again, to see whether it’s a worthwhile trade-off.
Thanks, Keith. What if I import directly from Word, since the steering committee will be delivering the document after they add their editorial touches in Word?
The “chunking” idea hadn’t come to me until reading David Hewson’s post on that subject, but seems to me it would work just fine. By the way, I really like letterbox mode for the final line-by-line proof; together with the spoken text, it’s the best final read. I’ve caught so many mistakes using those two features.
Damn - letterbox mode has been temporarily dropped from 2.0 owing to some bugs with it and time constraints. Maybe I’ll reconsider.
Import and export directly from and to Word isn’t brilliant, to be honest - it’s much better to use RTF, which all versions of Word support. You can just use Save As from Word to save the document as an RTF file, then export from Scrivener as RTF. You can load up the resulting RTF in Word and do another Save As to convert it back to .doc or .docx - you’ll end up with a better Word document that way than if you just use Scrivener’s direct .doc or .docx export.