Has anyone figured out how to import notes to Scrivener using the new Drafts for Mac (updated December 2019)?
Scrivener can import most common text formats, including TXT, RTF, DOC/DOCX, and ODT. So the short answer is to export from Drafts into one of those formats.
Katherine
After playing with this quickly… I’ve used this on iOS but not on the Mac, so this is a test for me as well…
If you’re using Drafts rather than Scrivener, it’s likely that you don’t have Scrivener open at the time, or you’re on the iPad, so it seems to me that the best mechanism is to get Drafts to interact with Scrivener’s Scratchpad feature.
The point about the scratchpad is that Scrivener doesn’t have to be open for you to use it — add text file to the folder and they’ll be there when you next open Scrivener via Window > Show Scratchpad.
This is what I do:
- Create an action in Drafts: Send to Scratchpad. My Scrivener scratchpad is at Dropbox > Scrivener Scratchpad and this is the action I wrote a while ago for iOS. It seems to work on the Mac as well.
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Type the content of your note and invoke the action (mine is called SPN New Scratchpad)
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Open Scrivener and the scratchpad and the new note should be there.
As you can see, I create the note in multimarkdown, which means I set the scratchpad to Default Format: Plain text Extension: mmd as well (in Scrivener Preferences > General > Scratchpad.) I also add the date the note was taken, the title and some tags and delete the draft after the action has run (no point in cluttering up Drafts).
That’s about it – you’ll have to play around with the action to meet your needs of course.
You could do all this with using Scrivener to import the files manually from a designated folder each time of course, but I like the scratchpad method because it gives you a simple option to importing or append to an existing document.
HTH.
Thanks. This sounds like it would work, It may be easier to do that than to send the drafts note to Notes or Bear and then copy and paste into Scriviner. I could do this from Drafts 5 as well. It would be nice to send a note to Scrivener w/o intervening steps.
I did something similar to this years ago to get a note from Drafts from iPhone to Dropbox to Scrivener on Mac. As I recall, I still had to pen a text file in Dropbox Mac, copy the note and paste in Scrivener, I eventually drifted away from that. I’ll check your steps and see how it goes. Thanks for the solution.
Well that sounds silly. If I was thinking of copying and pasting into Scrivener, I might just as well copy the note from Drafts and post in Scrivener directly. What I want is a repository of daily notes that I can assemble with tags, then import to a relevant Scrivener project when ready. I’m not sure that Scrivener is the most effective tool for storing random notes, observations and ideas. I’m not sure that Drafts is an effective storehouse either. And the issue of getting the notes into Scrivener remains.
No, you shouldn’t have to write an intermediary text file in Dropbox. Write the note in drafts, use the action to send it to the scratchpad folder, open it in Scrivener and send it to the correct project. That’s all you need to do.