I’m currently using Scrivener as a way of organizing a project for collaboration with a large team (who DON’T use Scrivener because they’re not awesome and organized like me). As a result, I use the “export files” option quite a lot, as it’s the only way I can share project-files with them.
However, there is one small issue which irks the hell out of me and makes exported files a pain in the ass to navigate, and I’m wondering whether I’m just insane, or if there’s some way to turn it off.
Currently, every time you export a scrivener folder, the exporter version of that folder contains within it a blank .rtf file with the name of the folder.
So if, for example, I export a folder named “ALL SCENES”, which contains the files “Scene 1”, “Scene 2”, and “Scene 3”, the exported folder will contain the following FOUR documents:
Scene 1
Scene 2
Scene 3
ALL SCENES.rtf
This root-folder-rtf is blank. It’s a 0kb file. It contains no information. I don’t know what it is or why it’s there, but it’s a gigantic thorn in my side.
In Scrivener, a folder is just a semantic attribute for a regular file. Any folder can be converted to a file and vice versa. Hence, you can type text into a folder as well. So, that folder-named file you’re seeing on your exports is the text on the folder. Since you don’t have any, the file is empty.
I’m not sure why you find this so “thorny” on you, but If you don’t need that file you may just ignore it or remove it.
Alternatively, you can select all the folder’s contents before exporting, check the Export selected files only option and then you’d not get that extra file.
It’s thorny because it creates a usability issue when I hand a scrivener file to somebody who doesn’t use Scrivener, and have to say “ignore half of these files; they’re useless.” That’s not a good thing to have to say, and doesn’t speak well of the software.
And yeah, I could go through and delete all of them manually. But that takes quite a long time, when you have a big nested hierarchy with fifty-thousand sub-folders (which is what Scrivener is FOR). And I would have to do that every single time I exported the files to windows.
And I still WANT the folders; I want to preserve the file-hierarchy. I just don’t want these blank 0kb rtf files in every folder. The whole point of having an “export to files” feature is, ostensibly, to export the same exact hierarchy you see in your outliner view for use outside of Scrivener.
Is there no way to disable this? Should I make a post in the wish-list forum instead? Maybe a checkbox on the export-files pane like “include text on folder-objects” ? Which somebody like me could then UNcheck?
AFAIK there’s not such an option. Maybe a wishlist post is a good idea.
On the meantime, as a workaround, you can do the batch delete of unwanted files at the Windows level. There are several tools that can help you on this. For example:
An easy way to find and delete those files, if you’re using Windows 7 (or if the file explorer works the same in the version you are using):
Browse to the base folder of your document tree. In the search field, enter
*.rtf
It should at that point show you two options: date modified, and size. Click on the size link, and it will show you some options for size; choose Empty (0 KB)
The results will be all .rtf files in the folder hierarchy that are completely empty. Select them all and delete.
Not possible, as it is on a Mac, to select just the text files you want to export and to ignore/exclude the offending folder so that it never gets created as an RTF file at all?