Nah, I need the sword there to remind me of the damage I can do if I’m not careful…
Katherine
When I have to send my manuscript to my editor and proofreader… that’s when I compile my manuscript to Word. Not a second earlier. 
There is a point when I feel the need to start thinking in a more linear way. Usually, at that point my text is complete in a rough form - sentences are not yet levigated, some paragraphs might still need a different equilibrium.
I don’t export to Word, a program I’ve long got rid of. I export to Nisus Writer Pro, where I work with the outliner open at the side of my document. It is not much different than working with the Binder open in Scrivener, but (while I can still rearrange blocks of text) I’m no longer invited to restructure everything. That’s the final sequence of chapters and paragraphs.
Paolo
“Levigated” is from the Italian “Levigati”.
In English it seems to be used of powders and so on, whereas in Italian it can be used of writing style.
In this context it means “polished.”
… in case anyone was wondering…
Declan
“Polished” is indeed the right word, thank you. But, as a second thought, “levigated”, as powder on a rough material, would work as well in this case (if you accept the metaphor).
(Alas, I cannot hope to become more than a pidgin writer!)
Cheers,
Paolo
Amber,
In the context of this thread, I have a question. It’s all well and good for everyone to say “wait till the last possible minute” before transferring your draft to Word; the problem is that there are all sorts of reasons why you might need to come back to Scrivener. For what I can see, this transfer is not easy.
Scrivener is great for creating a first draft.
Because of an excellent compile function, Scrivener is excellent for creating a final product, especially ebooks.
The intermediate step is the killer. There may be six or seven or more drafts or revisions before those two steps. Sooner or later you end up working in Word so that you can share your work, collaborate or whatever–all before you can come back to Scrivener.
Is there an easy way to go back and forth between Scrivener and the doc/docx/rtf world? Maybe import and then compare/merge with the existing Scrivener project?
Generally speaking, I don’t think that is too much of a problem. Most end state work is going to be in Word initially, and then finally in some other post-production layout and publishing tool like InDesign. But the author generally has very little to do with all of that. For self-publication, they might not be as easy to use as Scrivener’s compiler, but the compiler was never meant to be a publication engine, I’m afraid I don’t agree with you on that. Its typesetting is just based on the core Mac system which is okay, but not something you want to be printing and binding into a book, same goes for the Windows text engine (well, Qt really) as well. With e-books I can more easily sympathise with the desire, but it mainly comes down to which option represents more work for you: (a) copying and pasting everything back into the Binder by hand, or (b) creating your e-book in Sigil or some other tool using the revised text. Either way you’re probably going to end up in Sigil (or similar) ultimately, to polish off the work, so I don’t know. It depends on your aptitude with the e-book format I suppose.
But as for some way of automatically merging a single document into a 500 node outline (or whatever), that is just not possible. Maybe for the absolutely most basic of cases, where one word has changed or something, but any kind of serious editing is going to make the process of programmatic detection of seams in the concatenated version quite complex. Computers are very stupid. You have to tell them exactly what to do for all cases, and since there are no predictable paths that humans will always take in the process of writing and editing, there is no elegant algorithm to solve that problem. All you have to do is delete the last paragraph of a scene, or maybe move that scene to another chapter, and now the computer is confused beyond resolution.
The only way to do this is to cut everything out into individual files, linked back to their binder IDs from the very start. That’s what the external folder sync tool does (on the Mac at least). It works good for some scenarios, maybe it would work okay for yours?
How much do you care about matching the intermediate draft (in Word, say) to Scrivener’s Binder structure?
While it would be very difficult to deconstruct a Word document back to the Scrivener parts that created it, remember that you don’t actually have to do that. If you want, you can just import the Word document in one piece and go from there, creating new splits as needed.
Katherine
This is true, and if your proofers do mind putting up with a little “code” in the manuscript, you can use a custom separator that will not otherwise appear naturally in the text, like “<----->”, in the Separators compile pane, between everything. And then bring it back in using File/Import/Import & Split... designating that separator as the split mark. That will save you much of the “grunt work” involved.
Whether either of these approaches are useful depends upon how much you’ve invested into Scrivener’s various features. A rich outline with snapshots, maybe some keywords, lots of cross-references to research and so on will not be easily reproduced. In that case a bunch of copy and pasting might be ultimately easier.
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A couple of general observations and bits of advice form someone who wrote his thesis on WordPress on Windows 3.1, and has supervised students using every possible combination of software except Scrivener (and is new to Scrivener) so take it with a grain of salt.
He who makes major strategic decisions with the dream in mind of of flawless fully automated citation management will be disappointed. Imagine a world in which you handle the citations fully manually. That is a world in which you understand your literature, which you should do as a scholar, intimately. Think of all that meddling around with semicolons and dates and arcane formatting as foreplay, it will go better. If you can use a citation manager to get your manuscript to third base sooner, that’s great, but organizing your digital life around citation management software is not recommended, though everyone seems to do it.
Personally, other than the citation manager part (but see previous paragraph) I’m not sure why one needs to leave Scrivener. It produces a final product that the registrar of your university will accept. If your supervisor needs a Word document, follow everyone’s advice here and take the absolutely minimal number of steps to make that happen, which once some tweeking is done in your settings, should be one. Then, if your supervisor makes changes on that manuscript in word using Track Changes treat that as a hand marked up document and go through and make the changes you feel appropriate in your original Scrivener document.
This is excellent advice.
My own thesis advisor was, I now realize, a paragon. We argued about some changes, but his suggestions were ultimately reasonable and self-consistent.
Some clients, on the other hand…
I once ghostwrote an article for a group of about six authors from three different companies. Each of whom had their own ideas about what the article should or should not emphasize. And so I got six different sets of often contradictory comments. Utterly impossible to manage in Word. Some of the changes were substantial enough to render the original outline in Scrivener irrelevant.
The solution I found was to import all six Word documents into a new section of the original Scrivener project, preserving my original for reference purposes. Then I pasted together a composite that included the changes they all agreed on and asked them to resolve the areas where they didn’t.
Especially when extensive changes are required, I’ve found that it doesn’t help to be too attached to the “original” text or structure. It was a useful starting point, but new information (the comments) has made it obsolete. Let the ease of restructuring in Scrivener facilitate this process, rather than getting locked in to Word’s linear thinking.
Katherine
“At what stage do others transfer their manuscript to word?”
At the stage “when Hell freezes over.”
I dumped word a decade ago and have happily worked as a professional journalist ever since without ever missing it. I compile to RTF.
With my Word-enslaved coauthor though, I may compile to Pages, export as .doc. The big issue is dealing with footnotes, of course. I’ve asked him to put them in the main text for now, right after the sentence that cites them, and save moving to endnotes till the manuscript is ready to ship. Suggestions welcome.
Dump Pages and use Nisus Writer Pro!
NWP uses RTF as its native format so doesn’t mess with footnotes, images, etc. like Pages does on importing RTF files. Pages is only better at reading .doc(x) files with badly designed tables or “look what I can do” use of call-out boxes and text boxes.
Mr X
Why not remind your coauthor that Word can read .RTF files just fine, and let him do the .DOC conversion on his end?
Katherine
Thanks for the tips, all. We actually are just about to embark on this process next week so the advice is well timed, because I actually haven’t tried this yet.
The situation is this: at this point, we’ve got about 100K words already drafted in various states of completion, so it’s really too late to start from scratch in Scrivener. We’d have to retro fit our process into Scrivener and it may not be worth it at this point, sad as that makes me.
Our process: he drafts some chapters in Word and puts in footnotes. I want to work in Scrivener with the document that he’s already started. When I import has footnote-festooned Word draft into Scrivener, infuse it with my boundless wisdom (or whatever), then export my rewrite of his draft, now aglow with my brilliant revisions, of course, to RTF and then return that RTF file to him for re-importing into Word, won’t that bollix up the footnote formatting?
Moreover, Word and Pages allow change tracking and sidebar comments, which is helpful in passing drafts back and forth. Won’t those also be lost in a Word to Scriv to rtf to Word cycle?
The best option, of course, is for him to also use Scrivener, but he doesn’t want to learn a new app while trying to finish our tome on a tight publisher’s deadline. And I equally stubbornly refuse to descend to horror that is Word. Hence the compromise Pages intermediary.
If someone who’s written a footnoted book with Scrivener wants to help me make the case to my coauthor that it’ll be easier if we both use Scrivener (like when it comes to indexing, table of contents, keywords, etc etc), or point me to a thread that discusses that topic, I’ll happily share it with him.
I’m despairing that I just may not be able to use Scrivener with drafts that’s he’s started. I can use it to organize and assemble drafts that I start, and then export to Pages and continue our collaboration with Word and Pages only. I’d much rather work in Scrivener all the way to the final export to Word, but am not sure how to make that work with a non-Scrivening but otherwise quite valuable co-author.
Apologies for sort of hijacking this thread. I’m happy to start a new one in usage scenarios (or quite likely move this to an existing thread there – I’ve shamefully failed to search) if that’s better. Thanks for the help!
Honestly, I’d try to convince him to use Scrivener. If you have any substantial revisions remaining, the ease of moving stuff around in Scrivener far outweighs the difficulty of switching tools.
But if that’s not possible, surely there’s got to be a way to let you stay in Scrivener yourself?
I just tested, and you can round-trip footnotes and comments between Scrivener and Word: footnotes created in Scrivener appear in Word, and footnotes created in Word (RTF) survive the re-import back into Scrivener. I don’t know whether the process is robust enough for what you need to do, but it’s at least theoretically possible.
(Keep in mind that in true Scrivenerati fashion I don’t worry about detailed formatting until the end. This casual attitude may make your co-author crazy.)
Tracking changes is another issue, although I’m a little skeptical about cross-program change tracking between Word and Pages, too. Whether that’s manageable is likely to depend on how you work and the nature of the changes. I tend to just accept everything and then use the result as the basis for a fresh draft; YMMV.
Katherine
Thanks, Katherine, for your generous advice. I think the problem when we tried this some years ago was that he’d made the footnotes end notes, and they somehow got screwed up in the translation. I believe that that was an earlier version of Scriv, though, so maybe it’s changed. (this project was actually started before SCriv was a gleam in not-Kevin’s eye, then got interrupted by various factors, and only now has been resuscitated.)
I’ve not had trouble using Pages with Word-warped magazine editors; comments and change tracking survive fine. I suppose we could even think about google docs or (soon) Pages for iCloud as a collaboration platform but I’d rather keep it as simple as possible.
Anyway, thanks for doing that test. I’ll try importing one of his chapter drafts into scrivener and see how it works for both of us. Meanwhile, I’ll appreciate any advice from anyone else who’s had to dance with the devil in a Word/Scrivener duet.
Sending my thesis chapters back and forth to two supervisors, I had no problems with footnotes and comments between Word and Scriv.
Regarding the Word/Scrivener duet, I used to import each edited chapter as a separate document into my research folder (I set up a sub-folder imaginatively called something like “Edited chapters”) then used split screen to compare. I think, after doing this a few times, I may have even highlighted all edits in Word and changed the colour prior to the import so they were easier to find. If I didn’t do it, then I clearly wished I had because 18 months later I remember thinking, emphatically, that it was a good idea. Since track changes did not get transferred, clearly seeing where changes were made was the most challenging part of the duet. Note the obvious: changing colour does not highlight deletions.
Another alternative is to just work Word-Word (or Word-Pages) and let go of Scrivener. Some people here in the forums seem to advocate this approach but I prefer to stay in Scriv as long as possible. It wasn’t until the stage of final layout and minor proof-reading corrections that I stayed exclusively, albeit reluctantly, in Word.
Overall, I found working chapter by chapter relatively straightforward. When it came to sending entire drafts, the process became much more fiddly but still, for me, was better than writing in Word.
Wouldn’t snapshots work better here, or was this in Scriv version 1 (of which my memory is sketchy at best)? That view can show deletions as well as additions between any two snaps.
Scriv 2.
Snapshots only work with intact documents. If, like me, you have multiple documents within a chapter, then importing one single Word document as the entire chapter makes using snapshots of individual documents more difficult. Still doable, but requires more effort. Further, snapshots aren’t great if you regularly split and/or merge documents. I learnt to my chagrin that once a document ceases to exist (e.g. if merged with another) then the snapshots associated it with also cease to exist.
But your point is valid. Not everyone creates documents at paragraph level, so this may be a great solution for brett.