I had written about 100 pages of a piece in Google Docs before hearing about Scrivener, and when I copied and pasted it into the program the spacing was out of line from Google’s 4-space-tab format, and the text was unusually close together. Everything I wrote from then on spaced itself out and made tabs automatically, just the way you’d expect from Scrivener, but the initial chapters from Google refused to comply.
Compiling the draft to a Word document yielded some huge indents, due to what I presume is the adding of 4 spaces to Word’s tab function.
Rather than spend six hours adjusting every paragraph manually, is there anyway I can format the initial stuff to look like every other new thing I create in scrivener, with the well-spaced lines and auto tabs?
Edit: A second concern: the quotation marks and dashes are also different from how Scrivener makes them. Is there any way to fix this, short of paging through and spending another six hours?
For quotation marks, you can use Text > Convert > Educate Quotes (Straighten Quotes does the opposite). You can also choose whether you want to use curly quotes or not via the Preferences and via the Edit menu.
As for the spacing issue, I haven’t used Google Docs so I’m not entirely sure about that. Do you mean that Google inserts four spaces? If so you could use find and replace to replace four spaces with nothing (if you want to use Scrivener’s first line indent).
You can also set up Scrivener’s default text formatting via Preferences > Text Editing to get the formatting exactly how you want it for new documents rather than using the defaults if you so wish.
Have you tried doing as Save As to Word or RTF from Google Docs and then dragging the resulting file into Scrivener? I don’t know if it would work any better than cut and paste, but it’s worth a shot.
The quotes suggestion worked wonderfully, thanks for that. But the spacing is the real issue, and I realized that in Word you can fix it in a few seconds, it’s only a problem when I wish certain chapters would auto-indent. Unless there’s a way to make these chapters bow down to that idea, I think I’ll be fine since the end result won’t show up any different.
