Most of the time, when I import short RTF files, it goes smoothly. However, for this one 34 page 13000 word WIP, saved as an RTF (times new roman 12 point), every time I import it all the symbols get replaced with letters.
For instance:
becomes
Where the open speech mark becomes g, the close speech mark becomes h and the apostrophe becomes f.
Usually commas stay the same, but sometimes they are replaced by c, and so “Anna,” would become gAnnach.
This happens right throughout the story, every single “hello” is replaced with ghelloh and every wouldn’t is replaced with wouldnft. Is there anything that can be done about this? Given that it is 13000 words long… that’s a lot of work.
I was having the same trouble as mentioned above with some of the short stories I have, and was able to get around the issue.
1-Open document
2-Select all contents
3-Copy
4-Paste in new document
5-Save new document as RTF
This will import fine. However, if I had a saved word document and opened that, saving it as an RTF, that would NOT import fine. Well… yeah.
I don’t think I’m being clear. To summarize, there are three cases I seem to have with importing. Note that all three cases begin with a Microsoft Word 2003 Document (.doc)
I open STORY.DOC and go Save As… STORY.RTF and this file imports perfectly.
I open STORY2.DOC and go Save As… STORY2.RTF and this imports with errors as mentioned in the first post. If I then open STORY2.RTF, select all contents, copy/paste them in a new unsaved document and then go Save As… STORY2.RTF overwriting the first version, then import again, it now works fine.
I open STORY3.DOC and go Save As… STORY3.RTF and this imports with errors as mentioned in the first post. After going through the process in 2) above, it still imports with the same errors.
I hope this helps in some way. All of my short stories are now imported successfully, but my novel is still not. I’m sure that one of the factors is the length of the imported file, purely based on the fact that all of my short stories imported successfully either via 1) or 2) above, but my novel just won’t no matter what I try. (This novel is the document I emailed yesterday.)
Hi there- completely new here, but not new to importing/copying/saving, etc.
The most effective way to import a document as clean text is to copy it into notepad or it’s mac counterpart, which I don’t recall the name of at the moment. The point is that the simple text programs, are just that, text, and strip any extraneous info. You will lose any special formatting other than hard returns, but if you have hard returns between paragraphs, it is a very effective “middleman” to get files from complex formatting programs like Word, to other non-compatible programs.
Do you know what’s curious about this… When I copy/paste it all into Notepad, all of the speech marks are replaced by black blocks, as in the screenshot attached.
I then decided to try Wordpad. I copy/pasted all the text into Wordpad, then saved as RTF. When I import it into Scrivener, some of the speech marks are normal, but most still aren’t.
Before, I copied the text into Wordpad, then copied back out of Wordpad into OpenOffice, and saved it as an RTF and got to above result when imported into Scrivener (partially fixed).
I just decided to save it as an RTF straight from Wordpad, in which all speech marks were fine, and it imported like a dream. Everything is perfect.
So it would seem that OpenOffice is likely the culprit here?
