I’m slowly learning to format and print documents composed in Scrivener in LaTeX via LyX. It’s been pretty unproblemmatic till recently. Recently documents compiled for LaTeX in Scrivener are showing up with weird character substitutions in LyX, and either generate error messages or carry through the weird character substitutions when compiling for pdf. E.g., the em-dash is converted to âĂT. Similar weird substitutions are sometimes made for the en-dash, apostrophe, and double quotes, sometimes not. Accented characters get weird substitutions as well.
It has been suggested on the LyX listserv that the characters that get the weird substitutions are probably Unicode characters. I see there is a way in preferences to stop the substitution of em-dashes for double en-dashes, but not any of the other problemmatic characters.
Does Scrivener use Unicode when inserting characters like those mentioned? If so, is there a way to stop it from doing so.
The weird thing is that this just started happening recently, after returning from a hiatus from LyX/LateX.
Any help that could be provided would be appreciated.
Responding to my own post, the problem has been solved, and it has nothing to do with Scrivener. I’m taking it Scrivener does use/put out Unicode. The problem, it turns out, was a bug in LyX that caused it to fail to read Unicode in imported documents.
Would still appreciate feedback–at this point I’m mainly curious–on whether Scrivener does use Unicode, and if so whether it does routinely, or in special situations, etc.
I just opened an ordinary rtf file in TextWrangler (it was created in TextEdit) and it told me the encoding was UTF-8. Not conclusive, but suggestive.
Edit: I’ve just gone further, and opened a Scrivener rtf file in TextWrangler, and that also says UTF-8. (By that I mean that I’ve gone to Show Package Contents, navigated to the documents inside the folder, picked one of the rtf files that is in that folder within the package – so it must have been created by Scrivener – and opened that in TextWrangler.) So I would hazard a guess that Scrivener is using UTF-8. But my technical knowledge is of the kind that is often more dangerous than useful.
Sorry for the late reply. Yes, Scrivener’s plain text formats all get exported in UTF-8. If you require a different encoding, the best thing to do is to open the file in a plain text editor and re-save with the encoding of your choice.