Hello! I’m a new Scrivener3 user. I’ve amassed my research in the research section of my binder. I want to copy and paste from a document created in pages, open in View, into a new draft.
When I left click to drag and select, Scrivener produces a small PDF icon.
What’s going on?
As a work around, I tried opening the document outside Scivener and copying and pasting. The text in Scrivener draft was bold, and I could not reformat it. Why?
I just realized my message wasn’t totally clear: I cannot select text the Pages document I opened in the Research or in the Notes section of my binder. I can read it but I cannot select text in it.
Pages has its own unique format that isn’t editable in Scrivener. You can export a document created in Pages to RTF or DOCX and you’ll be able to import that directly into Scrivener as an editable document.
If you want to stick with copy and paste, try Edit → Paste and Match Style and/or select the pasted in text and, under Paragraph Styles in the formatting bar, select “No Style” (even if it already appears to be selected).
You’d have to open it in Pages first.
Yeah, to explain what is going on here, if Scrivener cannot read the file natively it will fall back to using the system Quick Look preview plugin for that type of file—very similar to what you would get if you press Spacebar on a .pages file in Finder. You will note that Apple doesn’t allow you to select text from there either.
It has always been that way, and I’ve never understood why they decided that was a good idea. It seems like being able to select from a Quick Look preview would make the feature go from being somewhat useful to very useful.
There was a way of enabling selection via a hidden setting, described in this article. However I have no idea if that works in Scrivener, or other programs that use Quick Look like this, or if it just works in Finder. It may not even work in the latter either any more—note the date on the article.
Just tried the setting: doesn’t work under Ventura… I checked with a Pages document QuickLooked in Finder.
Pity. I agree, it would be very useful!
Mark
Hmm, it looks like these days it might require one to enable the ability to customise your system.
Then again, that’s how I have my system set up on a permanent basis, and the override didn’t work for me either (macOS 10.15). So it may be the setting is no longer recognised.
Hi,
The override worked for me on macOS 13.3.1 in Preview (after “killall Finder”) but it still doesn’t allow me to select text when imported into Scrivener’s Research section (even after re-launching)
Since this thread has been resurrected, I thought I’d try again.
Interestingly, on my M2 Pro Mac Mini (running MacOS 13.4), (1) which is new since my post above, (2) which has not inherited any system changes from previous computers, and (3) on which I have never run the terminal commands in the article linked to… I can select text in PDFs, .pages documents, etc. when opened in QuickLook in Finder.
In Scrivener, I can select from a PDF but not from .pages documents.
Mark