Can anyone suggest a good workflow from Scrivener to Pages? My problem is preserving footnotes and using Endnote. I had been using Word, but it proved to be too quirky.
I thought about typing into Scrivener something like <>content of note<, then running a search on <> and putting them into Pages manually. Likewise, I thought I about just doing without Endnote.
If you already have Word, the best thing to do is export from Scrivener as RTF, open the RTF in Word, save it from Word as .docx, and then open the .docx in Pages. (If you don’t have Word, you can use OpenOffice to do the same thing, saving as .doc.)
The problem is that Pages doesn’t have very good RTF import, but Scrivener’s .doc and .docx exporters are basic (using the standard OS X ones, which Pages doesn’t). So converting an RTF file to a .docx file in a program that imports and exports both really well is the best thing to do.
Also, please take the time to leave feedback for the Pages team asking them for better RTF support:
Whilst I would love to have better .doc and .docx exporters in the long-run, writing our own exporters from scratch would be a huge undertaking and we don’t have the resources at the moment. RTF is much easier to support and is supported by all major word processors except for Pages, so it wouldn’t take too much work for the Pages team to support it better - and they have the resources.
The latest Nisus Writer version has an option to use what it calls ‘NeoOffice importer’ for docx’s, which appears to be a lot better than the native Nisus one. Given Neo’s (theoretically at least) open source, would there be any mileage in trying to do something similar in Scriv?
Only if I have a spare six months. Martin and the Nisus guys spent a lot of time getting their hands dirty with the OpenOffice/NeoOffice code to provide better Word import and export, and I believe it was one of the major improvements they made to Nisus Pro over Nisus Express. From what I understand, it certainly wasn’t trivial - I did look into it a while ago. I’ll hold my hands up and say that Martin and the Nisus guys are more experienced and no doubt better programmers than I am, with a wider skill-set. I’m Objective-C only and digging through the NeoOffice code would be somewhat beyond me, I fear. So this is another one of those “for-when-we-get-another-programmer” things.