Spent a while searching to see if I could find an answer for this on the forum but no luck. Perhaps I don’t know what I’m looking for , but…
I have an 80,000 word MS Word doc file that is broken into numbered chapters (with each beginning on a new page due to use of Word’s “insert page break”). Chapter numbers are generated via Word’s “Heading1” style.
As with Scrivener’s basic novel template, in my document each chapter contains one scene.
Is there a way to import this so that Scrivener recognizes these chapter breaks and imports them into separate chapters?
If not, should I save the doc file as text and step through the document in Scrivener and select the chapter numbers with “Split with Selection as Title?” Will these numbers (which will replace “Scene,” I think) cause problems when I get to the “Compile” processes?
John
I hope I’m wrong, but this feature (Import and split )is not yet available in Scrivener for windows, only for the mac.
I’m also hoping for this as it would save a massive amount of work on a long novel.
Marta
What you are looking for is the “Split at selection” menu option. I think It’s under the Edit menu. That will create a new document, moving the text after your cursor into that new document and removing it from the one you were in originally. There’s also a keyboard shortcut, but I’m at my Mac right now, so can’t give you the specifics.
If you haven’t gone through the tutorial (under the Help menu), I’d recommend that before going much further; Splitting documents is covered there, as well as a number of other features that you may find useful. Also, go ahead and check out the introductory video on the main Lit & Lat website. It’s for Mac, but it’s mostly applicable to the current Windows version, and will at least let you know about importing and splitting, which are core features of both versions of Scrivener, even if the keyboard shortcuts and user interface are a bit different.
The split with selection using title feature will save you a ton of time. Just select the title of the chapter in your long document, split, delete the title (compiler will most often use that to generate titles for you later on) and then proceed to the next title. A good trick here is to use the Edit/Find/Find by Formatting tool. Using this you can search by character formatting. Bold is a pretty common thing to find in a chapter title. So you can use that to quickly find the next title name, split and repeat.
The Mac feature, Import and Split, will probably not do what you want here. It’s mainly useful if things are broken up by some sort of predictable character string, like “###”.
Uhm. I saw a tutorial on Import and Split by David Hewson vimeo.com/31433040
He said one can use anything, not just symbols, but anything one wants to designate. Obviously it can’t be something common like the word 'THE" but I assumed one could use the word CHAPTER. Is that not correct?
Right, “CHAPTER” would be a string of characters (which are also symbols, technically speaking). If that is a predictable sequence in your document then it would work with a little clean up. I was referring more to splitting by formatting types, there isn’t anything for that. You couldn’t tell the engine to split by 24pt bold TNR.
MANY thanks for the fine suggestions! Yes, I did view the video tutorial and go through the step-by-step product review before purchasing and found both very helpful. The manual is also quite useful and well-written.
My challenge is that, if I wish to use Scrivener’s “Chapter/Scene” protocol, regardless of how I split (“at Selection” or “with Selection as title”) each of my “splits” becomes a scene under the previous scene (or chapter). My hope was that “with Selection as Title” would use the chapter heading (which I can easily change to “Chapter” in my doc file) for “Chapter” and put all the text below that in the chapter’s “Scene.” Another hope was that “Import/File” would offer a feature to recognize things like page breaks or a text string in a novel and separate it all out accordingly.
Nonetheless, the more laborious method I foresee having to do will not be a hardship, since I will be revising as I do the splits and clean up. Thanks again!
Yeah, really once you get into a good pattern, we are talking about maybe half an hour of work here, and that is a half hour that will probably be very well spent because the result is a much more agile and legible manuscript that you can see a bird’s eye view on. With some sort of automatic splitting, you would probably end up spending just as much time. Considering the time experimenting with the split pattern to make sure you have it right (there is always some detail that doesn’t quite work the way you expected from the start), and then the time you’d have to take scrolling through everything to make sure stuff didn’t get split incorrectly, or moving titles out of the text and into the binder name, etc. Either way you’ve got a little work to do to get an existing manuscript into the Scrivener way of things, but in the grand scheme of things it’s a small task.
You’re expecting a little too much of the software I think. These things are not really “chapters” or “scenes”, they are folders and files. One can use them to represent assertions and supporting facts in an argument, or even things that have no direct correlation to structure in the book at all. There isn’t anything in the software that considers a folder a chapter. Everything is generic and a flexible outline. The main thing that impacts how all of this stuff works is the compiler, which has a series of instructions in the Formatting pane that take a structural pattern (like files in folders) and insert bits of text like “Chapter ##” or format things a certain way so that this stuff becomes chapters and scenes when you compile. But you can just as easily alter all of that and make it do something else, or consider folders to be Parts and groups of files to be Chapters.
So that is why tools like split and merge can’t really “guess” at what you are doing and treat one split as a chapter and another as a scene. I would just work in a layer-like fashion. Break all of your chapters up. Don’t worry if they are folders or files. Some people work comfortably in chapter-length files instead of folder/files as their chapters or short or they are just used to working that way. So you could stop there if you want. If you want to be able to see scenes on the corkboard, then proceed to split up each chapter by scene and organise them how you wish. You can convert a file to a folder and vice versa, move things around in the binder to organise them into groups or take them out of groups—all of this is very flexible and can be done ad hoc whenever you change your mind.
I reluctantly agree with you, Amber, and I thank you for your comprehensive response. In an ideal world, it would all be easy, right?
Now that I have made the commitment to Scrivener, in the future, issues such as this won’t be, well, an issue!
Thanks again to all!
John
Computers only work flawlessly the first time in movies, and preferably with a 3-d interface that you wave your hands at and speak to. And you’re absolutely right, this is a teething problem more than something you’ll have to put up with on a regular basis. That’s a bit reason why these features are kind of minimal and lower priority in the first place.
I can’t say “in the works” at this moment, but it is on the list of things to do. Everything that the Mac can do is on that list. Our main goal, once bug reduction and optimisation are achieved, is to start plugging away at these gaps with the intent of getting the Windows version to feature parity as soon as is feasible.
, but…
Thanks again!