When I compiled & exported a draft to Word, the export had no paragraphs but only in some places. A few of the paragraphs were preserved.
The trouble is, I need all the paragraphs. I can’t even read it to edit without them, because it looks all wrong and it distracts me.
It was also a problem that all the italics got lost when importing. I had all the characters’ thoughts in italics, and now of course, they are not there. There was an option to turn them into underlines but I find that too distracting to read as well.
The real issue here is the paragraphs.
I have all the individual pages and the Text boxes checked to preserve formatting, and the paragraphs are all there in Scrivener, just as they were all there in the ms. I originally imported into Scrivener. But now I have to go through the whole ms before I can print it out, and re-paragraph the whole thing???
I don’t really have time to do that and I feel it should not be necessary.
How can I correct this and export the draft that I need? The one that matches what is in Scrivener?
Just to clarify, is this the same issue you’ve asked about in a couple other threads? The paragraphs are “missing” in the sense that the spacing doesn’t appear correctly in Word–that is, that they’re all run together instead of broken into individual paragraphs?
I have not asked this question before, actually, maybe someone else has. Sorry. When I searched for topics there were far too many to read through.
The issue is similar but different. The text is not all run together into one big block, but there are no indents (what you get when you press Tab) at the beginning of many (not all) of the paragraphs.
What is even stranger is that when I exported as RTF it came out correctly - with the indented paragraphs. I then pasted that into Word, and got what I wanted, but still feel this is a bit extreme.
No no, my fault, I read too quickly and it sounded like another question that recently came up, but I didn’t pay enough attention to the name. I apologize.
As for the actual problem…urf. I can reproduce it, just exporting a random project as a .doc file, though I may be doing it differently–you said you were preserving formatting for each file, and I tried to override everything with new formatting and got the same problem. But what it is about the specific parts of my document that are coming out funny, I’m not sure and will have to spend a little longer picking at. So I’m not being very helpful, but maybe someone more familiar with working on the export to .doc or .docx files will be able to help. Are you actually using the tab key for your indents, or have you set up the ruler to indent the first line?
On the other hand, generally speaking you’re really better off exporting as an .rtf and then opening that in Word and saving as a .doc. You don’t have to copy/paste, just open the .rtf. As Keith and others have explained elsewhere on the board, the .rtf format is just much better; for exporting .doc and .docx, Scrivener has to use Apple’s exporter, which is buggy and causes all sorts of random problems. I don’t know if that’s the pure cause of your indent problem, but it certainly seems to be a weird .doc glitch since the .rtf works fine.
Try clicking on the “Advanced search” link under the Search box and see if you can’t narrow your choice of topics. But if you spend time with the tutorial and FAQ, you may not need to search at all.
No, unfortunately this isn’t strange. The standard OS X .doc and .docx exporters lose indents and spacing. Try setting up a document in TextEdit with spacing and indents, and then save it as .doc or .docx and closing and reopening it - you’ll see the same thing. Unfortunately Scrivener has to rely on the same exporters.
Yes, I always use RTF format when I want to compile something to open in Word.
By the way, the indenting and paragraph spacing and font choices in the compiled result will be controlled by the Compile dialog (and not necessarily reflective of the formatting you see in the Editor view) unless you have Override deselected under the Formatting tab of the Compile dialog window.
(This separation between the formatting style you write in and the formatting style you compile to is a great virtue, but can lead to confusion if you do not know it is there.)
–Greg
P.S. My default in Scrivener is to use Courier with paragraph spacing set to 1 (i.e. single space between) and no indent. But my standard compile formatting is for Times with indenting and no paragraph spacing.