It appears all kinds of strangeness occurs when you import an .rtf that was created by Word 2003 that has track changes enabled on it. The most obvious sign is a negative number like -360 or -240 at the beginning of any line that has been indented, centered, etc. The other sign is that it imports all the text in the document even that which was deleted at one time.
In short Word attempts to maintain its track changes data even in .rtf format. The problem is Scrivener attempts to interpret the extra data rather than throwing it away. Of course you wouldn’t want to discard data that represents a change or an addition, so it may be impossible to fix this.
As a workaround, if one wants to maintain track changes data in their document then they will need to create a copy of the original .doc, turn off track changes in it, save it, and then save it as an .rtf before importing.
Also, I just noticed that when I middle click in word I get a weird artifact of text from scrivener whether it is minimized or not.
If it’s of any help, I am using Word 2003, on Win 7 Ultimate.
This is very valuable information. I was getting this problem with some files I was working with, actually while putting together the NaNo template, but they originated from the Mac. Are you positive these numbers correlate to track changes, because Mac text engine RTF files don’t implement change tracking, but perhaps these files originated from Word way down the line—that would surprise me though. It’s more likely an RTF version thing.
You might also try copy and paste as a work-around. Should save a few steps.
I got the strange -360 and -480 numbers at the beginning of every paragraph when I imported an RTF file that had been created by Scrivener 2.0 on a Mac, so I the issue isn’t just with Word files.
Oops, I should also mention that the RTF file exported by Scrivener 2 for Mac looked fine when I opened it using Word 2007, so the problem wasn’t there. And the strange numbers in Scrivener for Windows were on the beginning of EVERY paragraph. Here are what the first few lines looked like:
-360Alix Hyde
-480Alix Hyde – detective
-480Basics
-480Born: Andrea Kimberly Cruz (she doesn’t know). Earliest memory is as Annie Alix Sherrington
-480Name meaning: Kimberly
It appears this is more complicated than I thought. I originally got rid of it by turning off track changes and then saving it as an .rtf, but it seems I did something else to it as well. After digging into it a little, it looks like the -360 thing is caused by line spacing other than single. After I changed the line spacing to single they didn’t appear after importing.
However, Scrivener does import all changes from the track changes data attached to the resulting .rtf. I guess I was missing half the answer.
That makes more sense than change-tracking: I got the same thing (-480, I think) at the beginning of a double-spaced file I originally wrote in OpenOffice, saved as RTF, and imported to Scrivener …
Scrivener gets “confused” if your file name contains a period – foo.bar.001.rtf will not import.
I also get “-280” at then beginning of each line (after renaming to foo-bar-001.rtf then importing); quick workaround for me was to open the source file, select-all, then cut and paste to Scrivener.
PS – scrivener for windows – great work on a fantastic product!
After a little experimenting it looks like Scrivener recognizes the name of the import file as anything that comes before the first period, whether it’s an RTF, PDF or whatever. (It then gets itself confused because it can’t find such a file, so the binder shows a shortened file name and the text ends up blank).
The simple fix for the developers is to change the rule from “Left of First DotInFileName” to “Left of LastDotInFileName”… I think it’s as easy at that! …scribbler
This is a related issue. After I posted a new topic, I was told to come to this post.
I’m trying to import files in the research section. When I use Microsoft word 2007, if I save the document in RTF format, it works find. When I don’t save it in that format, it’s supposed to automatically convert it, but none of the words show up. It’s just a blank gray screen.
I got this same issue but did not import any files to scrivener. I use the Mac version of scrivener 2.0 and save all docs to my dropbox folder so I can just access it from there on the mac or windows machine. When I open the file in windows that I saved on the mac everything looks fine. Once I start to work on a scene and switch from it to another scene and go back I get the -280 at the beginning of each paragraph.
So from my end it has nothing to do with importing.
It only affects the scenes I work with that were started on the mac. Any file I start on the windows version are normal and do not change when I go back to the mac. If I come back to the windows machine after working on the scene I created in the windows version and work on it some more the numbers do not show up.
Just a short summary in case what I wrote is confusing.
Use dropbox to move from mac to windows and back with no import.
scene created in mac and edited in windows has numbers at the the beginning of pargraphs.
scene created in windows no numbers at the beginning of paragraphs
scene created in windows, edited on mac, then edited on windows again no numbers.
Please confirm you are all using Beta 1.3 as this random numbering was fixed previously. If you go the help menu and can see an ‘About Scrivener’ entry you are using beta 1.3, if you can’t then you are running a previous beta. The announcement section of this forum has details of the beta 1.3 download.
As far as the double period post goes - this has been logged and is a known bug.
