Import Plain Text Issues

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

The following only happens to Plain Text files that are imported into the binder (by drag and drop at least, I haven’t tested other methods.) Using Snow Leopard.

The text looks good and clean but is corrupt in the following ways:

  • Double clicking on a word will not select it.
  • Can’t look up words in Dictionary.app. Nothing appears in the Dictionary.app search pane—this is related to the next point.
  • Copy and paste between apps keeps these same problems. The text behaves the same way in Text Edit, Text Wrangler, etc.

It seems like there are many non-displaying non-printing characters between every letter.
It looks like there’s a problem in the text-conversion from text to rtfd on import.

I just used OS X’s built in textutil terminal utility to convert the entire folder of txt files to rtf files and they are behaving very well in Scrivener now.

I hope there’s a fix soon as it was aggravating and time-consuming trying to figure all this out and devise a work around.

Sigh, perhaps now I’ll get some writing done! :slight_smile:

2

Scrivener imports plain text as UTF8, so try converting the text files to UTF8 before importing.
Regards,
Keith

3

It’s already in UTF8, as that’s my default character encoding across all my apps.

4

Could you send me an example of a problem plain text file to support AT literatureandlatte DOT com?
Thanks,
Keith

5

I would love to send you a problem file. But I can no longer recreate the issue, so it may have been some bizarre Snow Leopard glitch—that somehow happened several times in a row in different projects.

I backed up the entire folder the files were in before converting with textutil. I wonder if simply copying the folder to a new location changed the files somehow.

I’ve been having crazy issues like this with Snow Leopard since I upgraded. The worst thing is I can never tell if it’s a problem with a particular app or with the OS itself.

If you still want I’ll send you a file (or the entire folder) but it may be an exercise in futility as whatever the problem was seems to have magically resolved itself.

If it ever happens again I’ll take better notes to what happened.

6

I’m glad it seems to have resolved itself for now at least - it sounds very odd, though. If you see the issue again and can reproduce it with a particular text file, be sure to send it over. Maybe it is just gremlins with the 10.6 update - there have been a few, though this one is new…
All the best,
Keith