I LOVE Scrivener and use it for my writing. Worth every penny.
However, when writing scripts I prefer Screenwriter (I have Final Draft 8, too). I just tried to import a script into Scrivener to work on it from there but can’t seem to get the hang of it.
I open a new project as a screenplay, name the project as xxxx and then import my script which I saved previously as a rtf file to my desktop.
All good. The script is imported fine and looks good. Everything seems to be in the right place. Except it is all centered with a large left hand margin.
I expected my scenes to be imported as scenes but the whole script has been imported as “general document”. If I go to each element and rename it (scene, action, character, etc.) Scrivener does not pick up on it and no new scenes appear in the left hand control panel in spite of now being labeled as a scene at the bottom of the center workspace.
Am I expecting too much from Scrivener (which I realize is not a scriptwriting program)? Or am I doing something wrong?
If I import my Screenwriter script into Final Draft 8 and then export it as a rtf as suggested in the help section and then import it into Scrivener, will I get a different result?
Thanks for any help on this. I am pretty sure I am not the only writer not using Final Draft so the answer could be helpful.
The trouble is, because you are importing an RTF document, Scrivener has no idea that it is a script, so it just gets imported as a regular text file. Scrivener would have to do some serious examination of every RTF file imported to try to discern whether it’s a script file or not, which could take a lot of time for lots or RTF files.
The next problem is that Scrivener recognises elements based on their formatting. So for the script elements of an imported RTF file to be recognised correctly, the elements in the RTF file would have to have exactly the same formatting as the ones in the current script format. For this, you could set up your own custom script format (Text > Scriptwriting > Script Settings…) based on one of the imported RTF files, so that Scrivener’s script formatting matches that of the Screenwriter-generated RTF files. That way future imported files should be recognised when you use your custom script format. See the “Scriptwriting” section of the Help file for details on how to do that.
I think you misunderstand Scrivener here. It sounds as though you are expecting the binder (the source list) to act as a scene navigator as in a dedicated scriptwriting program such as Celtx. It doesn’t - it is for navigating different documents, and in this case your scenes are all in one document. That’s easy to fix, though - just use Documents > Split at Selection or Split with Selection as Title (cmd-K and opt-cmd-K) to go through your imported script document and split it up into its constituent scenes.
The help section may be a little out of date there - for exporting from Final Draft you would use the FDX format - Scrivener always recognises elements from that format (although it still won’t split it into different scenes - an “Import and Split” feature is coming with 2.0 though).
Scrivener 2.0 has an “Import Plain Text Formatted Screenplay” feature especially for importing scripts from Move Magic Screenwriter and Celtx. So in 2.0 you would export from Screenwriter as plain text and, using this special import feature, Scrivener will recognise the different script elements correctly (and you can choose to have it automatically split into scenes in the binder).