(I previously suggested something like this in another post, but I’ll expand on it here a little, to maybe see if this makes more sense than what I originally suggested.)
Recently, I had a 250-page Harvard-style outline full of information I needed for a writing project. It was divided into sections like I. (Heading 1 style), A. (Heading 2 style), 1. (Heading 3 style), etc. In order to properly chop it up into .doc files that I could then import into Scrivener (so I could keep the contents organized), I had to get someone on the Apple forums to help me write an AppleScript that would take the Heading 1 level text and use it to create a folder, then copy any text under it into a file in that folder, and then scan for any Heading 2 text below that Heading 1, and then put that into a file within that folder, and so on. And on. And on. Took me a week to get the script just right — which was extremely frustrating at times — and then once the document was properly broken up, it took me a very tedious hour or so to recreate the folder structure in the Binder and import the files in each one.
Needless to say . . . This. Was. A. Total. PITA.
It would be great if Scrivener included some kind of “outline processing technology” — the ability to read through a .DOC or .DOCX file, determine if it is an outline or not, then determine that outline’s basic structure, then create a Binder folder-structure for it, with the text of its various sections all neatly broken up and organized into files. This could be made easier if the user could specify the style of the outline ahead of time — i.e., how the various sections are to be determined, what is the indent level of each one, what is the alphanumeric pattern of the heading prefixes . . . as well as way for Scrivener to “guess” at the structure and then work from there. (This would have to be limited to .DOC or .DOCX files, as RTF doesn’t story style info . . . at least, I don’t think it does.)
If anyone would like to see the AppleScript code that does this, I will gladly post it, as I don’t think the original author would mind. As always, this is just my two cents’ worth . . . for all I know, this would be something few if any other people ever used.