Hi there - I’m on the home stretch of my first Scrivener book and got most everything done on the print side. Now I’m onto the Kindle MOBI and realized that Scrivener does not give me the flexibility I need with this. So, I’m onto Plan B, which is to export to Word and then make my changes and create my file from there.
However, I’ve been pulling out my hair all day because it looked like Word kept converting my JPEG files to PNG files. Well, it looks like it’s actually Scrivener doing this (I could be wrong though). I’ve turned off options for Word to compress images and all that kind of good stuff. But, when I export to a Word document, I can unzip the DOCX file before even opening it, and see that all the images have been converted to PNG (and noticeably reducing the quality).
Assuming I’m on the right track, is there a way to prevent Scrivener from doing this?
Thanks for the help - love the product!
– Jim
Prior to 1.7.1, Scrivener converted images to the PNG format when they were inserted into the text. Since 1.7.1, JPGs are retained in their original format, but if your images were added to your project in an earlier version, they would already have been saved as PNGs. So you shouldn’t run into this in the future, but for your current project you would need to delete the existing embedded images and re-insert the JPG image to get it in the proper format. If you’ve already been working on an external copy, it’s probably simpler to just replace the images there rather than trying to update the project and re-compile.
Thanks, Jennifer - I had to redo my Scrivener images a while back so they should have all be added since 1.8. Just to make sure, I dragged out a picture from the Researc folder into Windows Explorer and it kept it as a JPG.
So, if Scrivener isn’t doing this on export (I tried it with the Scrivener and Office converters), then I guess I get to figure out what Word is doing (this should be fun).
Thank you very much for the quick reply. If I get this figured out (fingers crossed!), I’ll post another reply in case someone else runs into this.
– Jim
Jennifer, just to follow-up on your last post, I noticed when I export to other formats such as Web Page, Scrivener is still converting all the images to PNGs. Any chance you can test this on your computer to see if it is does that for you as well? I’m starting to think this might be a bug if it’s supposed to retain the original format.
– Jim
Only JPG and PNG files remain in their original format when embedded in the text; others are converted to PNG. This happens when the document with the image is saved in the Scrivener project, not as a part of compiling.
I did find a bug with this though in further testing–if the image is inserted into the text by dragging and dropping from the binder, as it sounds like you’re doing, it is converted to PNG. I’ve filed a bug report for this, but you can work around it for now by importing them from Windows Explorer. If you don’t have an external copy already, you can make a new external folder temporarily, then select them all in the binder and drag them out to the folder to export a copy, then insert them into the text from that external folder.
Thanks for testing this Jennifer - it does sound like that’s what is causing my problem. Thanks for creating a bug report.
I think for now I have a workaround, which I’ll mention in case anyone else is running into this - I’m going to leave it as is, compile it to Word, work off that document, and then when I save it to a Filtered HTML doc, I’ll replace the images in the folder it creates with the correct ones. I’ll edit the html file with a find and replace to change from PNG to JPG and hopefully everything will work correctly.
Thanks for all your help!!!
– Jim