I’ve been using Scrivener for a few months, and I adore it. I’ve having a small problem, though, that’s driving me nuts.
I export everything in Courier and open it in Word 2008. I noticed that the page looks almost justified; the right margin is just one or two characters “ragged” if that. In editing a line, it doesn’t act as a monospace type should – the kerning and space b/t words gets shoved around a tiny bit. I checked the alignment, and it’s left justified, and everything twiddly in Word is turned off.
If I open that same .doc in Pages, Courier behaves as it should, in all its monospaced, clunky glory. I’d be happy to just stick with Pages, but the headers don’t make their way over to Pages from Scrivener in that case.
Any idea what this could be? If I paste regular text into Word and apply Courier, it gives me the ragged right margin I expect. I’ve also tried exporting in RTF and opening it in Word – same faux-justification madness.
Any help would be appreciated. My current plan is to use Pages and do my own headers, but I like the Header feature in Scrivener, it seems a shame to do that.
I’m not entirely sure what is going on here… I do know that the text system exports don’t always work brilliantly with Word, but if it pastes in okay then I would expect it to export okay. Could you send me a test project which exhibits this problem when the text is compiled? Just a project where all I have to do is go to Compile Draft and hit compile to compile it to RTF or DOC, so I can go between the project and the Word doc to see what is going on? Just zip up a project and send it to me at support AT literatureandlatte DOT com. There may not be a solution, but I’ll certainly take a look.
Also, if your .doc file that you are exporting from Scrivener has headers in it, then underneath it is really an RTF file anyway, so you should be seeing no differences at all between .doc and .rtf export.
If you are happy to work in Pages, there is a workaround - just export the work to Word as .rtf or .doc so you get the headers, then just resave to .doc or .docx in Word, then open up the resaved .doc or .docx in Pages. The problem is just that Scrivener can only export headers and such features in RTF format (the .doc export is just a renamed .rtf export), but Pages has abysmal RTF support (even though that is the most widely and freely exchangeable rich text format…). So opening in Word and re-saving to a “true” .doc file - which Pages reads well (grr) will mean that the headers etc get carried across to Pages.