Latex to Scrivener Project

[rpatrico]

Hi All,

I was so grateful to have Scrivener while working on my dissertation. To save myself formatting headaches, I did my final edits as a Latex document. I’m now ready to start the slow process of editing the dissertation into a book. What would be the most efficient and accurate way to turn the Latex document back into a Scrivener project? There aren’t any pictures, but I have extensive footnotes that were converted to Latex from Markdown and biblatex.

Thanks for any advice and help!

[nontroppo]

Pandoc can convert from LaTeX back to markdown which can then be imported into Scrivener, it should handle footnotes without issue and it will convert LaTeX citations into pandoc citations

pandoc.org/

… you can also easily use Pandoc from Scrivener to go back to multiple outputs, and citations can be used in any output like EPubs / HTML to generate full bibliographies (thus more flexible than using other output workflows)…

[rpatrico]

Thanks, nontroppo. I was able to import the MMD file into a new project using pandoc. Do you know how the MMD footnotes, ( [^1], [^2], etc ) can be converted into footnotes in Scrivener’s inspector panel?

Also, do you have any recommendations as to how I can automatically divide the MMD file into sections on import? The original latex document had several parts, chapters, and sections. It would be great if I could automatically replicate that structure in the new project.

Thanks!

[nontroppo]

Did you try to use File ▸ Import ▸ Import and Split…? See §9.1.6 of the user manual:

Markdown Files

Used by files with .markdown, .md, .mmd and .txt file extensions.

In similar theory to the use of a stylesheet in a word processing file, Markdown headings describe a document structure that can be recreated in the binder. If a MultiMarkdown or YAML metadata block is found, it will be inserted as the first document at the top level. 1 Below that, each header found in the Markdown file will be used to create a new document at an appropriate level of depth, with any text following that header up to the point of the next header included in that document.

Convert Markdown When this option is ticked, Scrivener will use the MultiMarkdown engine to convert the imported content to rich text, removing all Markdown formatting in the process.

This process is done via the html output that Markdown creates, and so in essence Scrivener will be importing an html version of the original document. This may result in some limitations that you deem unacceptable. If you require more precise control over the appearance the document, you are advised to use your preferred Markdown engine to generate a document to your specifications, and then import that into Scrivener. For example, you could use the Pandoc engine to create a .docx file and then import that with stylesheet interpretation to split by header level.

I’ve not tried to see if footnotes get imported, but header levels and other formatting should be…