I am writing a series of non-fiction how-to books that will have a LOT of photos. My plan is to create in Scrivener, then export to Indesign CS4 to integrate with photos for ePub. A few questions:
Since photos cannot be entered directly in the Draft, is there any way to directly reference the photos in order to pull them up later in InDesign?
Is there a template to help get started in this format?
Doe you recommend a different tool to replace or complement Scrivener for what I am doing? (Outlining would be a must.)
You can most certainly put images in the draft. Just drag them into the document where you would like for them to appear, and there they will be. You cannot do much with them as far as alignment and text flow, but that is what tools like InDesign are for, down the road.
Yes, as AmberV says, image files can be placed inside text documents. You can drag them into the text, or use Edit > Insert > Image From File… Their placement is basic - no text wrapping around them and suchlike - but as AmberV says again, that can be fixed after you’ve exported to your layout program.
In fact, I haven’t added anything new to what AmberV said there, oh well.
There’s no template for this sort of thing at the moment. If you have any suggestions about what might go into such a template, please let me know as I would like to provide more templates in the future.
Oops, sorry I misunderstood about the draft section not being for text only.
OK, I inserted a photo and was able to resize it, which is a very helpful feature since I just need it for reference and context as I write the text. HOWEVER, the photo does not appear when I “Place” in InDesign. I tried exporting both RTF and DOC with same result. My apologies if this is an InDesign issue (the photo is present when I open in Word), but am I missing something that I should do in Scrivener?
Hmm, it sounds like InDesign does not properly read the full RTF specification. If you save the file as a Word document, and then import that into InDesign, do you have any luck? Sorry, I don’t have InDesign and have never really tested it for RTF feature support, so I’m kind of working blind.
That sounds as though InDesign doesn’t support RTF images. I just tried it out myself and it does indeed seem that InDesign drops them from RTF import. It’s probably because InDesign expects text and images to be in separate boxes, so it just grabs the text of the RTF file. I’m not sure if there is a way of getting text with images into InDesign from a text document, but my InDesign knowledge is very limited so I hope someone else has more experience and can advise the best way of doing this - it’s certainly a problem at the InDesign stage, though.
Usually, in a correct workflow images are linked instead of embedded in an InDesign document. This, becuase ID is expected to be used for high quality printing of brochure or magazine, and images are huge TIFF files. As a consequence, I guess, they strip down from the text file anything that is not text.
I have been doing quite a bit of experimenting, with some interesting results. Any thoughts or explanations would be welcome. I am launching a major project, so I would sure like to understand what is happening and be sure to use the correct method. Here are my trial steps and results:
I imported a 1.5MB JPG into Scrivener twice: the first time I left it as is, the second time I scaled it down quite a bit.
a. When I extracted the unscaled photo via the clipboard into Preview & resaved it as a JPG file, it was sized at 1.9MB (same result whether via Insert or drag-and-drop).
b. The corresponding result for the scaled photo was 312KB.
OBSERVATION: In both cases the photo is apparently modified from the original at some point. Therefore is it ever advisable to use it in the final product? (More below.)
I exported from Scrivener as both RTF and DOC. Both files were identical in size at 17,072,736 bytes.
OBSERVATION: Scrivener RTF and DOC exports are identical except for the Extension.
I opened the DOC export in Word, then Saved As with a different name, both as RTF and DOC:
a. Word defaulted to saving as RTF, which seems strange in itself; but then it could not complete the operation: “There is insufficient memory or disk space” (I have 1.5GB of memory, 54GB of disk space free).
b. When I selected to Save As a DOC file, it took a bit, but was successful, with a resulting file size of 8.2GB vs. the 16.3GB DOC file exported from Scrivener. However, when I extracted the JPG files, they were the same size before and after the Word “Save As” operation.
OBSERVATION: Word compresses the Scrivener DOC file, but does NOT further change the images.
Then I tried placing the various files in InDesign:
a. The image files were stripped from both the Scrivener RTF and DOC exports, as previously discussed.
b. BUT, the image files were NOT stripped when placing the Word “Save As” DOC file!
Finally, I checked the image file size once more, this time from the InDesign file:
a. The unscaled image was 700KB vs 1.9MB in the DOC file and 1.5MB for the original file.
b. The scaled image was 84KB vs 312KB in the DOC file and 1.5MB for the original file.
OBSERVATIONS: (1) If you add the step of opening the Scrivener DOC export in Word, then do a Save As, you can then preserve your photos when you Place in InDesign, (2) However, the photo files are changed from the original a second time.
CONCLUSION: There does seem to be a way to preserve the essence and placement of photos throughout the whole process, but using the resulting photos in InDesign seems questionable. It would probably be better to use them as identifiers and placeholders, but delete them after linking back to the originals (rather than just converting the questionable image via the “Unembed Link” command in InDesign).
Has anyone found a better way to write and process a book that contains a lot of images as well as text? (It remains to be seen how practical this is with a perhaps hundreds of photos and illustrations.)
Currently Scrivener stores text files internally as RTFD files, which are RTF files with directories. The images should be imported and plonked in the RTFD directories as-is. However, if you select to copy and paste, the image way well be placed on the pasteboard as TIFF data (just the way the pasteboard works with images), so the size may be different when you paste somewhere else and save. Of course, how the images will end up when exported will depend on the export format. RTF, for instance, stores images as hexadecimal data as RTF is a plain text mark-up format. The image will be encoded as JPG or PNG hexadecimal data, depending on the preferences you set in the General pane of Preferences, where you can also choose the compression factor via a slider.
Yes, this is well-documented. Because of Apple’s poor .doc exporter, if you export to the .doc format with elements that the default .doc exporter does not support in the document (such as images, a header or footer, comments, footnotes) then Scrivener uses RTF “under the hood” but changes the file creator code and extension so that Word recognises it as a .doc. Word is fine with this (I got the idea from Nisus Writer, which does the same thing).
That is one massive file!
I don’t really know much about Word’s internal handling of images.
It seems then that InDesign can read .doc files better than it can read .rtf files. As I say, when you export .doc files from Scrivener with images in them, they are really .rtf files, so any reader of those files will read them using their RTF reading code. InDesign apparently fails to read images from RTF, which is a shame as RTF is a much easier format to support.
I hope that clarifies things, even if it doesn’t exactly help much - hopefully another user might have some more insights into an actual workflow.
Uff-da, did I say GB for file size? It was actually MB. (The test files only contained a few sentences and photos.)
BTW, if any of this sounded critical of Scrivener, it wasn’t intended. Au contraire, my conclusion is that Scrivener appears to be a great compositional tool even when a lot of photos are involved, since there is a simple procedure to retain the photos in context all the way to a prepress product like InDesign (including print, downloadable PDF, ePub/iPad, and Kindle). The only question is whether the photos retain the quality to be simply un-embedded or if it is mandatory to link to the original source image.
Does Scrivener compress the image file when it is scaled? If so, this would enter into determining the best way to proceed.
I’m pretty sure it uses ZIP TIFF, which won’t harm the quality of the file, however, from what I can tell it would probably be wisest to work with placeholders in Scrivener and then link up to your CMYK calibrated files at the end, (unless colour profiles and DPI don’t matter to you, that is). From what I can tell, dragging a 300DPI CMYK profiled TIFF file into Scrivener, the result is a 93.633DPI file. The profile does appear to be intact, but it does use lossless TIFF-ZIP compression, which doesn’t have full compatibility everywhere.
It looks as though you are seeing something that is fairly well-known: that Word .doc files with lots of images and/or large images tend to be much smaller than rtf files (the Scrivener-produced .doc file is actually an rtf file with a .doc extension as Keith has explained).