Export to Word impossible

Hello,

I’m a novelist in France and although I love Scrivener to death when it comes to writing my books, I’ve been extremely annoyed lately at the impossibility of exporting my texts to Word and actually get my editors to read them. I can read the exported files with Open Office on my Mac, but the editors I work with, who have both PC and Macs, with Office Word, can never open my manuscripts, whether I exported them directly in any of the doc formats, whether I copied and pasted the text to Word and saved the file like that, or any other thing you can possibly do to transfer the text from Scrivener to Word. I do not understand this. This isn’t the first time, it’s happened with several different editors I work with, and with several different texts.

Any idea what’s causing the problem?

Thank you!

Without knowing the error message they get, this will be hard to diagnose. Do you have a copy of Word that you can test on?

No I do not. They told me it just says it’s impossible to open. I know it’d be better if I had the exact message but I’ve bothered people enough as it is resending a thousand files lately! Surely I can’t be the only one having the issue?

If you can’t copy-paste the text into Word and save it as a readable Word file, it doesn’t sound as if it has at all to do with Scrivener. But you mention Open Office. Does that imply that when you do this, you are copy-pasting into your version of Open Office Word and not into MS Office Word?

When you “export”, in what way are you doing it? Via Compile, choosing the appropriate output format in the Compile settings?

What version of Scrivener are you running and under which OS X?

… and how are you sending the Word files to the editors?

I have compiled to both .doc and .docx numerous times, and shared with PC colleagues via mail without having the slightest problem.

I am on OSX El Capitan and I use Scrivener 2.8.1.2.

Yes, at first I copied and pasted into Open Office or Pages, and saved that as a .doc file, so I assumed the problem came from that transition an an incompatibility between Open Office and Word, so I exported my files directly from Scrivener into a doc or docx file using the Compile option, without ever opening them, and the result was exactly the same for the editor trying to open it on the other side.

Oh, and I share the files using e-mail. Today, I only managed to do it because I copied and pasted my entire novel into the body of the email, which my editor then copied and pasted into a new Word document, which worked.

The files I export, I have no problem reading them myself, at all, with Pages or with Open Office. Other people, on the other hand, can’t.

It would be interesting to get a copy of a .doc file produced by your system. It doesn’t sound like a Scrivener problem but something else.

One more question: did you try compiling into .rtf? MS Word can read .rtf files without problems.

I did not, I didn’t want to lose all the formatting of my file, I was under the impression an rtf would lose all of it. But in any case, I want to be able to use a doc file, that’s the format I need to work with my publisher.

I could export a doc file and send it to someone and see if they can read it, maybe?

rtf keeps basic formatting like bold, underline, etc, and also tabs and a lot of other stuff.

I can look at a file if you want me to. Just send a private message in here (click on my ‘name’) and attach a file.

Did you fix this?

I am having a nightmare trying to do the same!

I have tried every possible configuration of compile it seems and it still seems to convert my fonts into italics and bolds all over the place, does not share my images or the tables. Please help?

It looks completely fine if I export to epublishing, but I need this in word to submit to an editor and publisher.

Grateful for any help?

Thanks

The Word file was quite okay so the problem must have been on the editor side.