A real newbie question (I watched the tutorial but am still confused) -
How do I import an existing manuscript that is broken up into chapters?
I’d like to have the manuscript in Scrivener with the list of chapters as the outline so I can have a double screen, working on the left side and scrolling on the right to different chapters.
Should I save each chapter of the manuscript as a separate RTF file and import them separately?
When I try to import the existing manuscript as a whole only the first section seems to show up in Scrivener.
Strictly speaking from a theoretical standpoint, it’s often far, far easier to just dump the whole book into Scrivener and then chop it up there with the Split command. Really, that’s what this command shines at: importing existing long works into Scrivener’s way of working in arbitrarily sized sections. But the best answer beyond that is: whatever format your book is already in. A lot of people keep their book in separate chapter.doc files to get around Word’s unwieldy nature with very long documents. So if you have 20 .doc files already, you might just want to drag them all into the binder individually.
Now all of that assumes a perfectly functioning workflow. If something is messing up with long document imports, first make sure you are running the latest beta, and if you are, try to identify precisely where the fault occurs in the original document by comparing them side by side in Scrivener and Word. See if there is anything unusual in that spot, like a table or an embedded vector graphic. Anything out of the ordinary—even a footnote.
I think the quote above explains why many, many people will be flocking to Scrivener for PC as it matures.
I didn’t understand the Split command before reading your post - I think that will solve my problem.
I’m trying out several writing programs and although each one of them has a very useful feature or two they’re getting opened less and less frequently while Scrivener tends to be open on my computer all the time now.
I imported the whole manuscript and then used the Split command at the beginning of every chapter and set those as folders under a parent folder that contains the whole manuscript. So I can have the whole manuscript on the left side and individual chapters on the right.
Sorry if I’m describing the obvious but never having used Scrivener before, the arrangement described above is incredibly exciting - and useful.
Sounds like you are getting it! Feel free to take this as far as you want. If a chapter is in need of a little organisation, you can take this same exact concept on the chapter, splitting it up into scenes and stashing them beneath the chapter item in the binder. Since you can always just select that entire chapter folder and view it in Scrivenings mode, there is no real penalty for doing this, and it will in effect work like chapters that haven’t been split up—it will just have that extra mobility it needed.
