Named Styles for export, please

[jtranter]

I’d like to put in a vote for the inclusion of Named Styles Export for Scrivener 2.

Needed:

Heading1
Heading2
Heading3
prose style 1 (first line indented)
prose style 2 (first line flush left)
blockquote

This would make life so much easier for me!

Mind you, Scrivener as it is makes life so much easier for me.

Onward!

John Tranter

[KB]

Hi John,

Thanks for the kind words. I’m afraid there are no plans for named styles, as much as I would love to support them. If you search the forums you’ll see that this comes up occasionally, and should be able to find a full explanation from myself for why it is so awkward, but in short it would entail me writing my own RTF exporter, which would most likely take a year of solid coding for a single developer such as myself! Currently I rely mainly on the built-in OS X exporters (I have hacked into them and improved them somewhat, but because of the way styles run throughout the code in RTF, it’s not possible to hack styles support), which don’t support styles at all.

Thanks again and all the best,
Keith

[tt1]

Hi Keith,

From a more recent post of yours I found:

@KB

I definitely recommend searching the forum for “styles” - you will find a lot of discussion! Scrivener doesn’t really do styles. The styles that you are talking about are just part of the OS X text system (see TextEdit). They are there only because the text system provides them automatically, not because I chose for them to be there particularly. I agree, they’re horrible. I am looking into different ways of handling this for 2.0, so I do hope that 2.0 will address this in some way.

I would be very grateful if you could expand on this a little bit. It would be great to hear, what level/aspects of support are you considering?

Personally, the thing that I miss the most would be a way (no matter how primitive) to be able to export styles so that Word can recognise them. I’ve been thinking that perhaps some sort of invisible tagging might do the trick? E.g. when user selects style “Title”, tags like … or something similar are added to surround the text but not actually displayed when working on the text in Scrivener. Perhaps Word’s Find&Replace could be then used to quickly replace all of those tags after export to .doc? Maybe someone who is a bit more familiar with Word’s regular expression capabilities could shed light on whether this would be feasible from the Word side?

Thank you in advance for any comments and good luck with the next version!

[KB]

Hi,

To be honest I haven’t really got to this part of 2.0 yet, as styles are still a little way down the list. One thing I have been considering though is just adding some hacked-in RTF styles at the Compile Draft stage. The problem is that I have to rely on OS X’s standard exporters (I’d need many months to write my own RTF parser), which don’t support styles. They don’t support images, footnotes, comments or headers and footers, come to that, but I have been able to add those things. Styles, however, are more embedded throughout the RTF, which makes them much more difficult.

One thing that might (might, might, might) be possible, is to hack in some styles information for titles that are added at the Compile Draft stage. So that at least a TOC could be generated in Nisus or Word, for example. But I need to experiment with this much more as yet.

All the best,
Keith

[Jaysen]

@KB

…One thing that might (might, might, might) be possible, is to hack in …

So that means it’s easy and you’ll do it, right?