Proper Import / Export Outlining Support...

[nontroppo]

Hi,

Now I’ll get this out of the way first of all – my request goes beyond what Apple’s RTF support accomodates. I’ve read your statements you don’t want to rewrite your own RTF parser and understand root canal work without anaesthetic is vastly preferable. Nevertheless you have implemented RTF stream manipulations to support annotations / footnotes etc and so I throw this out in delusional hope.

Premise A: Scrivener lives for outlines. The binder is where that goodness allows writers to structure and restructure their work. This is a critical workflow issue.

Premise B: RTF support outlines. Word, Mellel and most others have outlining features that are pretty essential to get the most out of them.

Conclusion: Allow hierarchical levels in Scrivener to be exported to RTF.

Boring details: From at least V1.7 of the RTF spec, there is a command to enable outline levels to be embedded in elements:

\outlinelevelN Outline level of paragraph. The N argument is a value from 0 to 8 representing the outline level of the paragraph. In the default case, no outline level is specified (same as body text).

Therefore Scrivener can output at least the first 8 levels to RTF. For Import you can read that then add the subsequent part to a folder / subfolder item.

Caveats: I’ve never had to actually write an RTF parser

p.s. I have V1.7 and V1.9 of the RTF specs extracted from their ridiculous .EXE containers if anyone want them.

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[1] microsoft.com/downloads/deta … layLang=en

[cyberbryce]

I see this in terms of mapping titles to headings.

So, for export, there could be an option in the Export Draft > Formatting pane that would, instead of applying the specified default style to folder titles, simply pre-pend the appropriate RTF \outlinelevelN tag to each title as it is inserted in the RTF.

For import, you would want Scrivener to structure imported RTF documents using these tags (catching them in the RTF before Cocoa strips them out), seemingly similar to how it currently parses footnotes.

Ways to achieve this at least partially right now. (1) If you limit your use of Rich Text, you can also have your titles exported to multiple levels of headings using MarkDown. You can also import Markdown and have it be structured according to the heading levels. (2) You can enter the heading as the text of your folders (Cocoa faux-styles makes this pretty easy), and subsequently convert them in your word processor.

I like the suggestion and I’m glad you brought it up. However, anticipating this may arrive far in the future or never, I manage pretty well with the workarounds for now…

Bryce