Copy and paste doesn't transfer formatting?

Hello!

I’m ENCHANTED with this program and I can’t wait until I’m able to purchase it. I’ve rooted around, but couldn’t find this issue, so I hope I wasn’t blind and that I’m not posting something redundant.

I am not able to download Scrivener at work, and I still like to get a few words in on my project at my desk whenever possible. I use Dropbox, and since the documents in the file folders are simply named by numbers, I tried copying my last scene into a rich text document. When I copy from Scrivener to Wordpad, the italics, bold, etc. disappeared. Hoping this will be fixed in the final edition.

Thanks!

Hi,

To retain formatting you need to use edit > paste and match style I think. The current shortcut is Ctrl + Shift + V. You should be able to change this to Ctrl + V with custom shortcuts in the next beta.

Also are you sure the documents are saving as rich text and not plain text?

Yeah, there’s a paste issue here where it seems to use plain text to paste into WordPad–there are a few copy/paste bugs into and out of some programs that are on Lee’s bug list to investigate and correct. If you’ve got Word, pasting into a Word file should work–OpenOffice, too, I believe. Another option is to just export the document instead of copying the text, and then work on that exported file and copy it back into Scrivener from there (going from WordPad to Scrivener should retain your character formatting). To do that, just select the file or multiple files you want to copy out of Scrivener and then use File>Export and choose a location and save name (e.g. “Exported Docs” or whatever, just to create a folder to contain the documents). They’ll be saved using the titles from the binder, so it’ll be easy to recognize them. (The exception here, and this will be corrected, is that if you export only a single file, rather than creating a folder with your Save name and putting the file in it, Scrivener will just apply that name to the exported file and no additional folder will be created.) Exporting in .rtf format is fine and you’ll be able to open them in WordPad and retain all the formatting.

You will just want to watch out for special things like annotations or footnotes, since WordPad won’t support these, and if you copy and paste the text back from WordPad into Scrivener you might accidentally paste over annotations in your Scrivener file that didn’t appear in the WordPad text. Of course if you don’t use these or are just adding new text at the end of the file rather than editing parts that might be annotated, you should be fine just pasting in the newly written text.

Thanks for your kind words about Scrivener, too!

Hi there!

Thanks for these helfpful and fast responses!

Stacey, yes they were saving as rich text files, but I’ll definitely give Ctl + Shift + V a try - I wasn’t aware of the sort of “paste special” shortcut.

Thanks a bunch for this! I’ve tried “compile” to get around formatting issues, but I didn’t realize that I could export individual documents, or that exporting docs would retain the binder titles, so this is great to know! Fortunately, I don’t have any footnotes or other annotations to worry about, but thanks for the heads up, just in case I try a non-fiction document before the full version is available.

You’re welcome! I’m very much looking forward to paying you guys for full features once all the details are stamped out. :stuck_out_tongue: