I experienced this in working on my latest book, co-authored with an academic victim of the Word evil empire. I drafted the chapters I started in Scrivener, exported to .rtf or .doc, and sent them to him. That process was a dream, totally validating the power and utility of Scrivener for me as a book (as distinct from long-form nonfiction) authoring tool.
My coauthor drafted in Word and sent me the .docx files. Scrivener had no problem with those, but we discovered that preserving footnote and other formatting as we edited and swapped files back and forth necessitated the intermediate step of Pages. Most of the second half of the collaboration omitted Scrivener entirely, with him working in Word and me in Pages. This was also happening when Apple was drastically re-jiggering Pages, necessitating the use of older versions for awhile…
Anyway, for a few weeks, until we got the system figured out (thanks in part to help on this forum), it was a bit of a train wreck, forcing me to deal with just the kind of formatting issues I thought I’d left behind years ago when I pretty much settled on plain text and Scrivener for my writing tools, depending on the situation.
Using Word/Pages also impeded our writing in other ways beyond the formatting issues. When it came down to restructuring some of the chapters he’d drafted, using Pages instead of Scrivener really slowed me down. Because he couldn’t easily re-organize text, his chapters tended to be a lot harder for each of us to work with individually, and because he could only see the resulting reorganized version on each swap, rather than the structure and final text simultaneously, as in Scrivener, the process became far more convoluted than it would have been using Scrivener throughout. Sometimes I’d be moving text between chapters, too, or crafting new chapters from pieces of old ones, and the process of scrolling long documents, flipping back and forth between Pages docs and so on – when I knew that accomplishing the same thing in Scrivener would be far easier – was sometimes maddening.
Yes, I tried to get him to buy Scrivener, and I think he might have tried the demo, but he didn’t want to learn a new app, understandably. Being forced to rely at times on a word processor model (Word/Pages) vs. Scrivener’s document organizing approach really reminded me how different the two really are, and how much less efficient (for a project involving massive amounts of research in text, rtf and pdf files, and lots of info-organizing challenges) any word processor or text writing application is from one, like Scrivener, that allows easy manipulation of chunks of info, visualization of organization, and so on.
Had I drafted the whole book in Scrivener, and then sent those chapters to him for editing and then swapping back and forth (whether using Pages or Scrivener), it would have been much easier. Using it for even part of the book literally saved me months, and not using on other parts cost me weeks (at least). Anyone wondering whether Scrivener is worth its price should consider how much time (and sanity) it saves on projects like these, even apart from the insights and creative opportunities gained by being able to easily see and work with structural elements.
I’ve sort of blotted the ugly technical details of just why we couldn’t swap Scrivener and Word files without formatting issues out of my memory, as it happened over a year ago. I’m sure it’d be easier next time, and maybe there’s a way to eliminate working in Pages entirely while preserving the picayune formatting requirements imposed by our publisher.
Hmm, at some point, maybe Amber, epederick, me and others who’ve had to deal with these Word/Scrivener issues should work up some kind of primer for the tutorial. It might be a common enough conundrum that it’s keeping many potential users from Scrivener. I know there’s been plenty of discussion about it on the forum over the years, like here. Or maybe it’s already there; I haven’t looked at the tutorial in ages.
My next book will be a solo project.