I have recently upgraded my mac to Catalina. This may be the reason that when I now compile to docx styles that before came through as, for example:
design
now come through as:
design + (symbol) FelixTitlingMT
this is throwing the formatting. So that I’m ending up with ‘high’ em-dashes—that presumably are in FelixTitling font. Worse it has modified the line spacing very subtly, thus throwing off the pagination of several book projects I was close to completing.
I was using Scrivener 3.1.3 and upgraded to 3.1.4 hoping that would sort the problem, but it hasn’t.
Do you have Options > Sharing > Conversion > Use Enhanced Converters for Microsoft and OpenOffice documents turned on? If so, try turning it off. I think it’ll still tell you that it’ll use Apple’s basic converter, but don’t worry. A few months back, Keith coded his own docx converter which will be used, and that may solve your problem.
it sort of sorts it—the styles come through a tad cleaner. But there are still major problems.
what I do once I have the compiled document in Word is overwrite its style sheet with one that I’ve saved. For some reason, that no longer works. Some styles remain as they are in the imported, compiled document. If I set these to the style they’re in, they convert to the style given in the Word style sheet. I can’t go through the whole book forcing each occurrence of a given style to reset…
some of the styles in the compiled document are also coming through with the Scrivener point sizes attached.
What’s happened? I’ve carrying out this procedure for months without a hitch. Now I have a seven book sequence that I’m about to release completely buggered up?!
I personally use Nisus Writer Pro rather than Word, which makes it difficult for me to give you further assistance, but …
Firstly, in setting up Styles, you don’t have to include font info; that is very worth doing as it can sort out many such problems further along the line. However, I don’t know how much trouble it would be for you to reset it all, but if you highlighted one of the paragraphs in question, chose Redefine style and uncheck “Include font family” and “Include font size”, all those paragraphs on compile should end up in the “default” font and size.
Secondly, as a non-Word user, I don’t know if you modify a style in Word, all the paragraphs in that style are automatically refreshed to the new definition.
As I say, I use NWP and don’t know how to do it in Word. I compile to a standard RTF which opens automatically in NWP, run a macro which imports the NWP definition of the equivalent, but cascading styles and resets everything.
If I wish to change fonts throughout, I merely have to change the resulting “Normal” font definition, and it cascades through. If I want to change something about a particular, individual paragraph style, I do that in the style sheet and all paragraphs in that style are changed accordingly. I find it hard to believe that Word should be less competent in such things.
That probably doesn’t help much, but I hope it gives you some pointers to think about.
If you go into the style picker in Word, right-click the style and select “Modify”, then yes, you can update the style definition and when you click OK it will apply the updated style change to all text in the document currently using that style.
well, thanks for the help guys. I didn’t actually sort it using the method you suggested—although that was part of it. I did change the conversion as you suggested… and, as I said, the formatting problems persisted.
my solution was to go add styles into the compile stage—specifically styles that weren’t weren’t 'section layout’s (for those, your advice to redefine the style in the main editor, so that it no longer saved the font and size, worked). I then made sure to give these extra styles the right font and size I wanted for my final .docx, and made sure to ‘include font size’ and ‘include font family’ and this did the job.
there was one other very subtle effect of the upgrading (either of Scrivener, MacOS, or even Word—or some combination of these) was to change the number of lines on some pages… This only happens in a very few places, but given the way my books are configured in ‘scenes’ with ‘bullets’ between them, this actually caused my book, in one place, to lose a whole page!
anyway, it’s working now, and that’s all I care about. Thanks again
