Now that GitHub is giving away tiny private repositories for free to students and scholars, it seems like as good a time as any to introduce git to my Scrivener dissertation.
However, the files in foo.scriv/Files/Docs are .rtfs, so even though I’m writing exclusively in mmd, my git diffs (and the repository on GitHub) are full of all the messy control characters rtf brings to the table… control characters that I will never need. So perhaps it could be possible to have a project save all its scrivenings as txt (with a customizable file extension)?
I thought this might already be possible, but I could not figure out how to implement it.
(This is related to a similar request to be able to edit “format blind” and theme the editor window in a way that is not reflected in the final document, turning Scrivener a bit more into an IDE)
I don’t know if it’s possible in the main project or not - but maybe one work around would be to use the `Sync’ folder as the plain text holder? When you set up the sync you can choose the format and change rtf to txt. I do this all the time so I can read my project on my Nexus (with a plain text reader) and I’ve recently also successfully mounted the Scriv Sync folder as an external source in Ulysses III so that I can work in the evening on bits of text with a full dark solarized screen (very easy on my ancient eyes).
I hadn’t thought of that. Cheers. But doing so, I think I lose all the scrivener magic (comments, etc.) if I use the sync folder as my git master. I can’t rebuild the project from scratch by cloning from GitHub, then… I want to be able to keep the Scrivener magic while also being able to read the files usefully in a diff (though I see in another post that something like Beyond Compare could help with that, despite being not free…)
That’s what I do, too, but I’ve just defined the default rtf style in Scrivener to the dark solarized theme (which is the second part of my wish, to let me define the look of the body text editor without affecting its “final” output).