I’ve just come back to Scrivener after a few years of absence. I’m writing an article and have a lot of notes in different word docs that I want to pick over, use chunks etc. I’ve just hit a brick wall with the font/style thing. Why won’t scrivener preserve the original document fonts when importing? Why does it change it all to Times? Is there a way of changing this action? Times irritates me.
It should preserve the original font - the only reason it wouldn’t is if the OS X text system has no equivalent font. Also, the .doc and .docx importers aren’t the best, being the standard OS X ones - what happens if you save as RTF from Word and import the RTF file instead, does that have the same problem?
Thanks for reply KB ~ following your suggestion, if I save and import as RTF then the style and formatting of the original doc seems to be preserved. It’s a bit of an annoying extra step to have to take though.
On closer look I notice it’s not just the font that’s not imported but styles and other formatting. The fonts in the original docs are standard and in the os, i.e. if I open text edit they are listed in the font window. I’m using latest version of snow leopard and word for mac.
Any ideas on why none of the document style or formatting is being imported?
It’s down to the OS X importers. As a one-man development team, I don’t have the resources to write my own .doc and .docx importers and exporters, so I use the ones provided by Apple. They are, sadly, very buggy, which is why I always recommend using RTF instead. Many other things are lost from .doc and .docx import and export - line spacing, indents, footnotes, images and so on. You can see the same if you try to open a .doc or .docx file in TextEdit. I’m looking into an external Java library at the moment that might improve things.
Hey KB thanks for the reply again. I completely understand, just wondered if I was missing something in preferences. I must say I did quite excited this morning reconnecting with a sense of the potential within Scriv. I also think it’s changed a bit since I last used it for a project back in 2007. Didn’t mean to sound unappreciative. All the best.
Not unappreciative at all - I totally understand, as the current .doc and .docx support is a real pain, which is why I’m actively looking for a solution. Scrivener has changed quite a lot since 2007 - improved, hopefully! - and I’m glad to hear you’re reconnecting with it.
Thanks and all the best,
Keith