Revision Notes and Pages Support

Scrivener Wish List
1

For starters, i absolutely love Scrivener. For me it’s the best writing product out there, period. I had utterly given up the idea of writing a novel but thanks to Scrivener and NaNo i have a very good start. In fact, i recently bought an iMac (even though i am practically destitute) simply because it gave me access to Scrivener.

That said, if i had a wish (and this is simply due to my frenetic and loose writing style) it would be for a revision pad much like the Document Notes and Project Notes (which are wonderful by the way). I understand many people use the comments tags to annotate possible revisions and that’s terrific and i will use it for sure, but i really would like a nice tab to throw thoughts about revision issues - much like the document tab, etc.

Also, and this is more of a question seeing as i am a recent Mac convert - how does one convert or compile a Scrivener file for Pages? I’m unfamiliar with the extensions on Mac. I’m used to using Word but i’ve heard awful things about it on the mac so i went with Pages and i like it, but when i try to Compile for it it comes out all wonky.

2

Unless I misunderstand you, you can already do that. :slight_smile: In fact, you can have as many project notepads as you want. You’ll need to call up the notepad interface, it’s in the Window menu under Project Notes. Just click the little plus button on the far-right to add new tabs. Anything you add here will also be available in the inspector area. You can flip between with with Cmd-6 and Ctrl-Cmd-6.

There is no good single route to Pages from Scrivener. What you heard is basically true from a usability standpoint. Word is pretty awful no matter what platform you use, but Pages isn’t very good at talking with other applications, which makes it troublesome to use for writers. The best way to get a file into Pages without losing too much is to go through either Word or OpenOffice.org via Scrivener->RTF->WordProcessorOfChoice->.DOC->Pages (it’s not good enough to use Scrivener’s .doc compiler because that is also supplied by Apple and has many of the same flaws that Pages does). Apple just really never put together a good package for Pages. It does “okay” with Word files, but with anything else it is pretty woeful—it can’t even read older Apple word processor formats. I know that isn’t what you’d like to hear, after having just plumped for it.

Probably the best word processor on the Mac is Nisus Writer Pro, though, it speaks RTF very well, and is pretty good with DOC too, which is important. It works great with Scrivener right out of the box. I’d put Mellel up in that group to, but it is a little more idiosyncratic unless you are a firm believer in stylesheets over ad hoc formatting, is cumbersome to use. It also doesn’t support everything Scrivener puts out, but for most books it will do fine. There is a chart in the Scrivener documentation that shows just what does and does not work for all the word processors. Word and Nisus are at the top; with Mellel and OpenOffice.org very close behind. Most others are dodge, and Pages is down at the bottom of the list (though it can be redeemed with a conversion to .doc).

3

I use Scrivener and Pages, and I find that the RTF export from Scriv goes nicely into Pages.Sometimes I just select Scriv text and drag directly into Pages, with no problems. Most of my texts have no footnotes or other fancy formatting items.

Once that’s over, Pages is a great processor for long documents, especially when I’m trading comments with a DOC or DOCX copy editor.

4

I vote for native Pages support. I and collaborators will use Scrivener to prepare manuscripts of books, and we want to have a two-way path between it and Pages, which we edit in. Also, some support for Endnote would be great as well.

5

Please also submit your vote to Apple’s feedback system, as they are the ones that really have any realistic control over the matter. What they need to know is: Pages should support the standard RTF specifications on import and export, rather than the basic specification they use now. Either that or they need to create a .pages import/export tool for the Cocoa text engine so that their word processor can join the rest of the world. RTF would be the best solution though, as a .pages generator would be just another black box.

As for Endnote, you can already hook up your preferred bibliography database with Scrivener. In the General preferences pane, set up Endnote as your citation manager. There is plenty of advice on the forums for getting the most of this combination.

6

Many thanks. I shall go annoy Steve again…

[Pages won’t import Endnote citations in RTF, nor will it export them.]

7

Yes, I’d love to support the .pages format, and it’s one of the most frequent requests I receive. Unfortunately, as Ioa points out, the proverbial ball is in Apple’s court. It’s only possible to support a format if it’s documented (unless you reverse engineer the format, but then Apple changes the format slightly with each release). The best paths for great Pages support both rely on Apple, which are:

a) Apple publish the .pages format so that developers can write their own importers and exporters. (I was able to create the Final Draft translators, for instance, because Final Draft shared their .fdx and .fcx specifications with me.) It doesn’t look like they have much intention of this, though, as they did publish a partial spec for Pages 1.0 on the developer site, but with the caveat that it shouldn’t be used for writing full importers (!) and that it was unlikely the .pages format would ever become public. It was then never updated and was removed from the Apple dev site last year sometime, so now there’s nothing.

b) Apple provide out-of-the-box .pages importers and exporters as they do with other formats (Apple provide basic translators for .doc, .docx, .rtf - although Scrivener’s RTF engine is much-modified - and many other formats, but nothing for .pages - they never provided anything for Appleworks, either, though).

c) Apple provide better RTF support for Pages. This would be by far the best option. Pages already has very good .doc and .docx support but its RTF support drops page breaks, images, footnotes, headers and footnotes and comments. And yet I was able to add all these features to their standard RTF translators (which lack these things by default also) - RTF is a very simple, plain-text format, and if I can do this then the Pages devs should be able to add this stuff with ease - it would probably only take them a few days.

So, the best thing to ask Apple for is probably better RTF support - RTF import and export that supports page breaks, images, footnotes, comments and headers and footers. If it did that, getting work back and forth between Scrivener would be a breeze. Here’s the Pages feedback form page:

apple.com/feedback/pages.html

(As Druid says, though, if you don’t need headers and footers, footnotes, images and so on in your document, then you can just export as RTF and open that in Pages without too many problems.)

The one thing I could do my end to provide better Pages support would be to provide much better, fully-native, .doc or .docx translators. Currently I rely on the standard Apple-provided translators for these (the ones used by TextEdit - Pages uses completely custom-built ones), which, like Pages’ RTF support, drops footnotes, images etc, so it’s a Catch-22 - Scrivener has great RTF support, but Pages doesn’t; Pages has great .doc and .docx support, but Scrivener doesn’t (it’s always better to take an RTF to Word from Scrivener). In the long-run I would love to provide much better .doc and .docx exporters, but these are massive and very complex formats; it would probably take a lone developer such as myself a year of doing nothing else just to code a decent translator. (The Windows version will probably have much better .doc and .docx support because on Windows you can buy third-party converters that will take an RTF and convert it; the Mac unfortunately doesn’t have so many options.) So this is something that will have to wait until we are - hopefully! - one day a bigger company and able to afford to hire someone to create something like this. Off in the future…

Thus, for now, prodding Apple and hoping they add better RTF support is the best bet.

All the best,
Keith

8

However, the more I use Nisus Writer Pro, the more I like it. Today I had a list of random lines that needed sorting in A-Z order. Scrivener can’t do that for a series of text lines; Pages can’t do it, but NWP can, as Sort Paragraphs.

9

I love Nisus Writer, and NWP 2.0, which is around the corner, should cover everything Pages does and more. Martin, one of the developers, has helped me out with the intricacies of the OS X text system no end, too.

10

I love Nisus Writer too, and I have great expectations of NWP 2.0. But I sincerely do hope 2.0 will have a better handling of long documents with many footnotes than the present version has; or else it won’t be of much use for those among us who make frequent use of Scrivener’s excellent notes and comments features.