I love Scrivener. I really do. I’ve used it for years. But one thing that really drives me nuts about it is that it lacks a clean, easy way to export your projects for web publishing. And I do a lot of my professional writing in CMS’s such as WordPress, Drupal, and certain proprietary systems. Scrivener is great for doing the actual writing, but when it comes to bringing the copy over to the publishing system, I invariably have to do a little hacking in order to make it work, keeping all the text styles and links intact.
If I’m missing something, please let me know. However, I’ve been doing this for years, and I’ve searched the forums, and I haven’t found any really good solutions.
When I want to write text for an online CMS in Scrivener’s rich text editor, I have three basic options to get the text into the CMS:
1: Copy and paste the text straight from Scrivener and into the CMS.
This would be most ideal, but in most editors, such as WordPress, the formatting and links doesn’t survive the pasting process.
2: Compile the document(s) from the Scrivener editor as an HTML web page.
Better: This method keeps the bold, italics, and links. However, it also brings over a lot of extraneous CSS and tags, which require some cleaning up in the text editor. For instance, a compile of this text:
produces this code:
[code]
Testing Document p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 36.1px; font: 16.0px Georgia; min-height: 19.0px} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 36.1px; font: 16.0px Georgia} p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 33.6px; text-indent: -0.4px; font: 12.0px 'Courier New'; min-height: 14.0px} p.p4 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 33.6px; text-indent: -0.4px; font: 12.0px 'Courier New'} p.p5 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; font: 12.0px 'Courier New'; min-height: 14.0px} p.p6 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-align: center; font: 12.0px 'Courier New'}This is a test link to Google.
The last word is in italics.
The last word is in bold.
The last words are in bold italics.
[/code]Note that in the code above, I only put one return at the end of each line, but compile produces a blank line between each, presumably to simulate the line spacing (1.5) of the original rich text. Also, there’s no good way of producing blockquotes using this method.
3: Use MultiMarkDown and compile into HTML; Open the HTML file in the browser, then do a cut-and-paste into the CMS editor.
The best of all the options, but still a little bit kludgy. It produces simple, clean HTML; you can make blockquotes; and it preserves the links and styling. However, it’s frustrating because you have to do all the styling by hand in Scrivener. This isn’t so much of a problem with bold and italics, because Literatuer and Latte has had the foresight to include the Format > Convert > Bold and Italics to Multimarkdown menu item. It is, however, a royal pain in the tuchis if your writing includes a lot of hyperlinks, and mine often does. To get around this, I’ve installed a script that lets me use a keyboard combination to create MMD links. If there were keyboard commands or toolbar items for MMD formatting, as you’ll find in MMD editors like Texts or Byline, this would be more workable. Also, MMD doesn’t allow you to specify the target="_blank" feature in order to open your links in a new tab or window. Not a major issue, but a little frustrating sometimes, because the policy of one of the publications I work for is to add target="_blank" to external links.
Like I say, I am a huge fan of Scrivener, but I would really like to be able to streamline my workflow from the desktop to online.