Compiling to RTF or DOCX?

Scrivener
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Hi,

I noticed that a document compiled as RTF and as DOCX appears slightly different when opened in MS Word.

For example, despite the margins being the same, the text lines may be cut in slightly different places. It is as if the DOCX document has slightly more compressed lines, fitting some more characters. The RTF documents seems to be somewhat more relaxed, airier.

Applying manual formatting, like italic, to a paragraph results better in the RTF document than in the DOCX one, where even spacing seems to be altered.

Web links have different colors (B=255 vs. RGB=0, 103, 191).

I’m not aware of other differences.

Is there a preference for the one or the other format for compiling? I’m tempted to say RTF, but I wonder if there are other things I should consider.

Paolo

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RTF is Scrivener’s native format. Output in any other format will have gone through a converter of some kind.

If you Compile to DOCX, Scrivener does the conversion. If you Compile to RTF and open the result in Word, Word does.

There are a few known bugs in Scrivener’s converter; Compiling to RTF and letting Word do the conversion can work around those.

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I see that Word can edit the RTF files without forcing you to save to its own format. That’s interesting, in case you want to re-import them into Scrivener.

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just a note (and highlighted here by experts from time to time) as I understand it: RTF is a Microsoft format first used in Microsoft Word. Hence using the format in both Scrivener and Word can be a good match.

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LibreOffice is also good in dealing with RTF.

The only one that does a disaster, by stripping out most non-basic formatting (including styles) is Apple Pages. If you want to edit an RTF file in Pages, it is better to convert it with Word or LO, and save it as DOCX.

Paolo

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