I have been doing research on my project for five years now, and have accumulated a massive number of imported HTML files. So imagine my shock and horror when I tried opening some of these files, and realized that they weren’t there. The only imported web pages that I could open in Scrivener for Windows are the ones I imported in Windows. Since I’ve only been using Scrivener in Windows for a few days, this is very bad news.
So, is there a fix for this? Other than going upstairs to my freezing office and getting back on my Mac desktop?
The problem is that they aren’t HTML files, they are saved using Apple’s proprietary WebArchive format, which is pretty much the only way of storing a page offline on a Mac with native tools, and not writing your own whole mechanism for it. It’s the same thing you get when saving a page from Safari. It is also sadly unusable just about everywhere else. We’d obviously support it if we could. You know Apple, why use industry standards when you can invent some other thing and then tell nobody what you did?
You may be able to find a .webarchive file converter for Windows. Seems like that is something someone would have wanted enough to reverse-engineer the format by now and figure out how to make it something more standard, like… MHT. That will be what Scrivener for Windows wants as a file format.
But if not, you’ll probably have to brave the arctic and use Safari or something to save them to a better format.
Either way, to get them out of Scrivener use File ▸ Export ▸ Files....
Another option is to view the .webarchive files externally in your browser. Firefox and Chrome and presumably others have extensions to view web archives if they can’t by default. (It’s been a while since I did it, but I assume options are still available.) Then in Scrivener, select Navigate ▸ Open ▸ in External Editor (Win+Alt+Shift+O on Windows, ⌃⌘O on Mac) or click the curved arrow in the editor footer to load the file in the browser alongside Scrivener.
That could be it. I was asked if I wanted to open the files in Firefox; it just didn’t work. I’m going to check and see if there’s an extension for that I can install.
