I love Scrivener and would be happy to live without other writing apps, but I often need to compile to RTF and open a document in another word processor in order to have a citation manager generate a bibliography and format citations. Previously I’ve used Word for this, but I recently tried Pages, because it loads faster. In Pages, I’ve found that my documents are missing page headers and footnotes. Is this because I need to change some compile settings to make my documents Pages compatible?
There is a section in the user manual on how to use Scrivener with Pages. It doesn’t read RTF files very well, as you’ve noticed. They haven’t put a lot of effort into that angle of the software and have spent more time working on the .doc/x importer. So you should use that format with Scrivener, provided you are using the new 2.3.x version with improved converters enabled. If you are not using that combination of features, then you must use a third word processor that can (a) open an RTF file decently and (b) write a good .docx out. OpenOffice and Word are good, as is Nisus Writer Pro.
Another alternative, incidentally, is to use your citation manager’s RTF scanning capability. This is what a good number of our authors prefer to use, as you can largely skip the word processor. Not every manager has an RTF scanner though, and some work better than others. Endnote is notoriously finicky, for instance.
Thanks for the information. It’s not a big deal for me – I think I’ll just get by without Pages.