So I’m in the process of trying to refine a Scrivener/iPad mini workflow-- I will be using iPad mini principally for editing documents I am drafting in Scrivener, and so my plan is to export individual documents to Dropbox via drag and drop, sync them to iPad mini, and use an .rtf text editor on the iPad to mark up the document before dragging the marked up document back into Scrivener. My plan is, use strikeouts for sections I want to cut, and colored text for additions, and then accept/reject my changes once I’m back in Scrivener. I think I will like this better than a true Scrivener sync, because it allows me to take a few breaths before actually changing my draft, much the way printing and line-editing does.
Here’s my problem: the .rtf program I’m using on the iPad mini, called Textilus, doesn’t for some reason “read” smart quotes, apostrophes, or smart-hyphens, so all of those marks are just missing in the imported .rtf document (although I can see them in word, word-pad, etc.). I think the simplest solution is for me to go back to not using smart quotes and hyphens, but I can’t figure out how to get rid of the smart quotes and hyphens that are already in my very long documents. Furthermore, Textilus can’t read the paragraph formatting, so that the extra spacing I have before each paragraph doesn’t show up either. That has led me to wonder if a better solution would be to create a compile setting that forces extra space before each paragraph, and/or disables smart quotes and hyphens. Is such a thing possible? If I then brought the edited file back into Scrivener, would I have to manually delete the extra spaces?
In short: could somebody with more experience with this program please help me think about a reasonable import/export workaround? I feel like I’m almost there-- just a little push would get me the rest of the way.
You can convert smart quotes to straight quotes either at compile time, in the Transformations tab, or directly in the editor using Format > Convert > Quotes to Straight Quotes. Compile will certainly be faster if you’re doing a lot of documents, since all you have to do is tick a box and you’re done; converting in the editor would need you to load each document and select the text for the conversion. Both of these will include both double and single quotes.
For smart hyphens, I’m assuming you mean em-dashes? This is another easy transformation in compile: “Convert em-dashes to double hyphens”. Alternatively you could just use either find/replace or project replace to swap them in the actual project text.
While you’re at it, I’d convert any existing ellipses to just three periods, too, unless you know these appear correctly in Textilus. Again, either the checkbox in compile transformations, or replacements in the editor.
Benefit to compile would be the conversions, which would mean you didn’t have to alter your original text, although that may not matter so much if you’re bringing your work back in, since presumably once it returns from the iPad it will have straight quotes and double-hyphens regardless. If you stick with the export option so you can have individual documents and just drag and drop, you’ll need to do the one-time more complicated chore of cleaning up the special characters, but once you’ve done it you won’t need to repeat it as long as you set the options to not substitute these characters.
The extra space before the paragraph is trickier. There’s not a way to insert an extra line between each paragraph at compile time, unless you happen to have each paragraph as its own document in Scrivener. You also can’t currently search for paragraph breaks, so to do this you’d need to add an intermediate step of searching and replacing in a third program, to add them before working on your iPad and then stripping them out before importing back into Scrivener. The actual find/replace could be done quickly on a compiled text in Word, but if you’re working with a lot of individual documents rather than one composite, it could get tedious. Depending on your project, maybe it would make sense for you to add the extra empty lines while working, so that you can easily see paragraph breaks on the iPad, then save stripping the lines until the final formatting stage after you’ve completed your manuscript. At that point you can compile and then clean up the extra lines in Word or OpenOffice or the like.
Thank you so much for your long and thoughtful reply! For the time being I am resorting to “compile” to solve my problem since, as you say, it’s much quicker. I have created a compile setting with all those “convert” buttons ticked, and it imports perfectly into Textilus. For the paragraph breaks, I got a fix from the latest update to Textilus: you can set a first line indent in Textilus default style, so when I bring the document in, all my paragraphs are indented. Then when I return to Scrivener, I apply standard formatting, which removes all the paragraph indents and restores my paragraph spacing. I’m really happy to hear about the Format/Covert/Quotes to straight quotes menu item, which I never found in all my digging. Scrivener is full of these marvelous surprises!
More good news: I have been in touch with Textilus, and they claim that all the “smart” conversions will work properly in the next update of the software. The paragraph formatting is (I think) hard-coded into .rtf, so I will just use the above indenting solution.
As for Textilus: I’m very pleased and excited about it as part of my iPad workflow solution-- it’s the only iOS software I’ve found that plays well (above issues notwithstanding) with both .rtf and dropbox. I’m loving dragging my file from Scrivener into dropbox, working on it in my iPad, and then dragging it back into Scrivener when I want to incorporate my changes. Just mentioning it here in case others are searching, as I was, for a reasonable windows/ipad/scrivener workflow.
