I am writing a non-fiction book and have established a template with settings for font, size, etc., and have looked in the manual for dragging files into the template and having those files converted to how I want them to appear. I have not been successful so far. Instead I have had to set up a style for main text and quotes and have to highlight all the appropriate sections individually to execute the style. There must be an easier way but I have not found instructions so far. Any suggestions would be welcomed.
Confirm that the settings you want are the default for the project, by creating a new document and adding some text.
Then, apply the Documents → Convert → Text To Default Formatting command to the imported files.
You probably don’t want to use a “body” text style at all.
That’s not the way templates work.
What sort of files are you dropping in?
Pages documents from the previous book. This one is the revised and expanded book. I have highlighted each of the chapters and then copied and pasted them into the non-fiction template that is provided but it stays at palatino, etc. and I cannot convert it.
Thanks. I will try doing it this way. I noticed that Pages documents are not supported. Is that why I cannot convert the text once I have copied it into the template?
Yup — Pages uses a proprietary file format, and so is not directly convertible — if you drop one in, all you have done is put a copy of the Pages file into the project. And all Scriv can do is show you a preview image of it (and let you open it again in Pages). Importing alien file types into Scrivener has its uses, but it is not what you are looking for here.
You should save Pages docs in Word format and then drop the resulting file into the Binder. (Saving as RTF also works, but I am told the Pages’ conversion to docx format is more faithful).
If you want to preserve formatting as best you can, don’t use copy and paste (which likely only preserves things like italics). Instead, drop the docx file into the Binder and let Scrivener convert it.
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Thanks for your help. It worked this way fine. I am surprised there isn’t information about this in the manual. It does say that Pages files are not supported but what to do about them to bring them into Scrivener since everyone who owns an Apple product is using that software.
Thanks. That worked and it seems to be progressing fine.
It says somewhere that you can pull almost any file into Scrivener, and it shows how to open in external editor if you can’t open directly in Scrivener, but it won’t say that again for every possible document type.
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FWIW, the OP’s remark was not about Scrivener’s capacity for housing external file types. For that is not what they were aiming to do and was not the resolution to their problem. They were trying to bring the content of a Pages document into Scrivener as a doc while preserving as much of the original’s formatting as possible. So, their comment was about the manual (at the point where it says Pages is not a supported file type) not pointing out that there is an indirect way to convert one by saving the Pages doc as a diff file type that Scriv can convert and importing that.