HI there,
I’m brand new to Scrivener. I did search the forum for an answer on this, but couldn’t find an answer ( or the right keywords! )
I’m attempting to export from scrivener to word format, but the document formating doesn’t seem to export into word?
I’m speaking about the title, body, header, sub-header format that is typically used in word to create a auto-table of contents.
Although I can use those same settings in scrivener and they seem to do the same thing. It looses all that meta-data in the conversion process.
Is there something I’m missing here? This software is awesome and it fits REALLY smoothly into my workflow as I’m already a strong outliner/mindmap/oplm kinda guy.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
thanks!
@netmanchris
I believe you are talking about stylesheets, where your headings are set to heading levels, and that automatically makes an outline that can be used by Word to create a ToC? If so they aren’t supported by the standard rich text export engine. You’d have to use MultiMarkdown to get stylesheets on export.
However it’s fairly easy to use Word’s ability to select text of the same formatting type and batch apply a stylesheet assignment. So, as along as your formatting is consistent coming out of Scrivener, it’s a five minute job getting stylesheets hooked up to it after compiling.
Hi AmberV,
Thanks very much for the answer! This sounds exactly what I’m trying to do.
Any chance you have any pointed on how to do this with word? I’m very glad to hear that it’s only a 5 minute task… I just don’t have those skills.
And yes, I’m been very consistent in my heading so this should be easy from the sounds of things.
Can you point me to info on how to get word to select text of the same format and batch apply a style sheet?
I’ll google it too, but hoping you might have a blog or a pointer.
thanks!
Chris
In my version of Word (Mac Word 2008), when you select text of a type of format (e.g. bold capitals etc, that format will be shown in the Style section of the Formatting palette. There is an option in that section to ‘Select All’. Then you can “Pick style to apply” in the list below.
HTH
David
I’m more familiar with the Windows version of Office, but in there you can right-click on text and from the “Styles” contextual menu, click “Select All Text with Similar Formatting”, then after that, click the stylesheet assignment you desire for that text. Thus you only need to do this for as many times as you have variations of styles in the document.
I would like to see the same thing with the HTML out put. That one is NOT quite so easy to transform into a structured document.
Scrivener should have an option on what level to set headings too when it outputs HTML (
,
, etc) and should probably allow a different heading level for each binder level.
Also, when Scrivener outputs HTML it embeds they style into each and evey single paragraph, which is a formatting DISASTER for trying to tweak a format after export. It should instead output with a style sheet so that formatting can be tweaked document-wide. It does this when it exports to epub, so it’s in there somewhere.
In the case of HTML output for both platforms, we utilise the basic text engine’s capabilities for converting RTF to HTML. This is otherwise a very complex and arduous development process, to create one from scratch. While this lets us provide HTML export, it does mean it comes with some limitations in flexibility. We just can’t control it in the same way we can control something hand-built, like the Collections feature.
A tool that I recommend to anyone who is working with HTML files in one way or another is Tidy (Mac | Win). It’s especially useful for cleaning up the output generated by word processing programs or updating documents to the newest spec.
As for applying semantic elements to types of text generated by the Formatting pane, yes we do already have that on the list. You’ll be able to assign h1–6. Anything beyond that is not currently feasible for the reasons described above.
I also recommend considering MultiMarkdown, if the Web is your main focus. It will produce 100% semantic and squeaky clean files devoid of all formatting save for type assignments (like blockquote, caption, etc). It also supports HTML5.
Hi @AmberV/@David,
opened the doc in windows word and this works perfectly. It would be MUCH better if the styles could be exported intact from scrivener into word. This would save a lot of time in the long run, but can’t complain considering the flexibility that scrivener gives me compared to what’s natively in word. 
Thanks to everyone!
I think I’m a scrivener convert!
@netmanchris