When I export a text file from Windows Scrivener to a Word doc, then send it from my PC to my editor who’s using a new Mac, it comes out with “wonky” formatting. The page numbers I inserted in the so-called Word doc don’t show up. She says it comes up as a text file (probably means RTF). This won’t do at all, but I don’t know how to clean out the underlying RTF coding or whatever would be necessary to convert Scrivener files to a true Word doc.
This makes me sad, because it means I really can’t trust files that come from Scrivener to be true Word files and I can’t afford to send a “wonky” formatted document to an agent.
I’m at the place now where I need to take the whole document out of Scrivener and somehow make it into a true Word file that will retain formatting etc when opened by a Mac.
Can you tell me how to do that?
Currently the exporter Scrivener uses for .doc is RTF-based, essentially wrapping it in the .doc extension. This is fine for Word, which supports RTFs, and it just adds some convenience by opening in the default program for .doc files rather than .rtf, which often is different (e.g. Word may be the default for .doc but WordPad the default for .rtf, and WordPad does not support all the features that Word does). What program is your editor using? It sounds like she may be opening the file in Pages, which does not offer good RTF support and would strip things like the header/footer, etc. This wouldn’t be a problem on Word, but if you’re trying to provide something for Pages, you’ll need a little workaround.
If you have Word 2007 or higher installed, you can switch which converters are used in Scrivener by going to Tools > Options and in the Import/Export tab selecting the option to use the MS Word converters. This will give you the option of compiling to .docx (you may need to restart Scrivener to see that option in the list), which should work better for Pages (and of course will work for Word). I’m assuming though you don’t have that option, in which case I’d suggest downloading the free OpenOffice Writer and using that as a midway for opening a compiled Scrivener document and resaving to .doc. LibreOffice is another free option, and there are others that you could try–OpenOffice has a fairly robust feature set and should handle the conversion well; I don’t know about all the others (thinking of AbiWord, Kingsoft).
Thank you for your prompt reply…I appreciate it! It sounds hopeful that I won’t have to retype the 60,000 words after all. In a way it doesn’t matter what program in Mac my editor is using … others who are less tolerant might have the same issues.
Will definitely explore the options you describe and report back.