Bear with me, Keith and Amber, and use small words to explain what’s happening.
I’ve imported draft # you-don’t-want-to-know of my novel into a new project in Scriv, entitled YET MORE REVISIONS. I imported it from an earlier project and all went well. It was in courier 12, and I’ve been selecting text and converting it to Optima with the little “Style” button in the ruler as I go through the scenes, as I find Optima easier to work with. But I’m losing all my underlinings. Optima supports underlining, so I’m not sure what’s happening. Is there any way around this? And now, in order to get back all my underlinings in the work I’ve revised so far (because of course I’m halfway through the book and just noticed it now ), is there anyway to search by format or do I have to go through the original documents side by side and word by word?
I’m afraid the bad news is that you’ve lost your underlinings. When you use the style button in the ruler, it goes about things in a bit of a scorched earth manner. For future reference, I recommend working in sections, and when you are done with a section, use the Documents/Convert/Convert to Default Formatting menu command. This will be much more gentle on your source text and attempt to retain font variant settings like underline, bold, and so forth.
Yes, on first read I thought you were actually revising as you went along and marking things as Optima once done, but if all you are doing is importing your Word document and changing the font, you should definitely start over!
Here is what you want to do:
Import the Word document into a new project
Select the imported document in the Binder
Use menu item [b]Documents/Convert/Convert Formatting to Default Text Style[/b]
This assumes your preferences are set to Optima (which they probably are unless you’ve fiddled with it before). The only thing to watch out for is if you are using another font (like Lucida Grande) which does not support all variants like italics and bold. But with Optima you should be safe.
Now you can go ahead and start splitting up your Word doc into something a little more manageable.
Thanks, Amber, I was afraid of that. Oh well, nothing is truly lost, thankfully, as there are umpteen copies in various different formats I can retrieve the underlinings for.
Jaysen, it’s a matter of the messy mind. I now have five–count them, FIVE–projects for this one novel. And within each project, there are several versions, duplications, snapshots of every document. I am easily befuddled, unfortunately, and when it gets to the point where I am confusing DRAFT/Part Two/Chapter Three/Scene Five with REVISED DRAFT/Part Two/Chapter Three/Scene Five with DRAFT2/Part Two/Chapter Three/Scene Five with Draft1/Duplicate/Part Two/Chapter Three/Scene Five, I just copy what I THINK is the latest compilation of scenes and move them all to a nice clean new project. The current project I actually copied BACK in Scriv, breaking it back down into scenes (documents) from what I foolishly believed was a finished work in Nisus.
TMI, I know, but that should answer your question.
Is there any chance that 2.0 will be less heavy-handed with the styles? Losing underlining or italics from pages and pages of text when you’re only changing the font is tremendously frustrating.
I’m pretty sure this will require Apple to fix the OSX text system.
Also, I think styles by definition change ALL format attributes to those set in the style. At least that is how M$ seems to handle things in winblows version of Word (2003 version is what I just checked). Other program may do it differently.
Dear Mrs Mollys Mum,
I was about to offer you a consultation, but then realised we all have our limitations, my good self included. In this case, especially, my good self!
Do Take care
Dr Mulality
), is there anyway to search by format or do I have to go through the original documents side by side and word by word?
especially, my good self!
: May as well be in Vietnamese!