Hello all. I’m pretty sure I know the answer to this, and that the answer is “no,” and I’m prepared to be OK with that. But I’m putting in the question in case I’m wrong, because that happens a lot.
I’m writing a novel in my beloved Scrivener, and I’d like to kick out an intermediate version to send to beta readers, incorporate their comments and corrections made using LibreOffice (rtf or .odt), then re-import the bits with resolved corrections and keep working while maintaining the lovely structure that Scrivener supports.
The “low-tech” way is to just take the .rtf document marked up by my readers and enter the corrections by hand. The reason to avoid doing this is that it’s likely to introduce new and exciting errors that will have to be corrected later.
I’ve practiced exporting the project in various ways. For instance, I can export it as a bunch of folders of stuff. Of course, once I do that, the chapter-folders are filesystem artifacts with no structure and are sorted alphabetically or by date, and so are the individual scene-documents that are the folder contents.
I’ve also tried importing and splitting the compiled .rtf. This gives me a project with a flat (not nested) collection of scenes with no chapter structure and imports the front matter as part of that. Naturally, I’d like to avoid that as I want to be able to, for instance, easily change scene separators and whitespace as a publisher requires.
There’s also the option to buy a beta reader a copy of Scrivener. I could do that, but I’m not sure that I can ask a reader to learn to use a new piece of software just to help me out.
Is there any method that will do everything that I want? I expect that I’ll end up using some creative hybrid of all of these not quite right methods, but I’d like to gather as much information as possible to minimize my frustrations later, as the real world is frustrating enough right now.
Be well and safe everyone.