Does anyone have any recommendations for the best workflow to get a text + images document created with Scrivener through Affinity Publisher to create a print-ready PDF ?
My Scrivener binder is designed to compile to Markdown for web publication, so it has implied headings as well as linked images.
Ideally I’d let to get a process where the content when imported to Publisher has both text styles and images in picture frames.
I have other tools lying around such as Marked2 and Pandoc that might be useful for creating intermediate formats. So far, I’ve found that compiling to .docx manages the text styles properly and compiling to .pdf handles the images as I would wish.
For print-quality output, you probably want to use full-resolution images, which means you probably want to store them in an external folder outside of Scrivener. Does Affinity Publisher have a workflow that allows you to import text and images separately?
It mainly wants InDesign files, (.idml) or PDF’s for complete documents , Word (.docx), Rich-text (.rtf) or plain text (.txt) for text although i think I now have it importing a Word doc with embedded images produced by Pandoc from a Scrivener markdown compile which is nearly doing what I want with a bit of fiddling. In Scrivener, the files are all linked rather than embedded, so, to your point, I may check if I can get Pandoc to stick with linked images as i know Publisher will do that ok.
I expect to do about 9 of these print items, totalling about 2000-2500 pages of material originally shared on the web. I have the web piece working pretty efficiently, so I’m trying to iron out a decent repeatable process that will get that material in reasonable shape for print, so a workround or two here and there is ok.
Unfortunately, of all these formats I think ICML is the only one preserving linked images.
While InDesign can import these (into existing documents, or in new, untitled documents), Publisher can’t. I’ve asked them to add this compatibility, but I don’t feel it was ever noticed. Sigh.
At this point, I would like to see how to transform an ICML file to an IDML one. There is a lot of additional things in an IDML file, but maybe there is a template that can be used to wrap in an ICML file produced by Scrivener → Pandoc.
EDIT: Alas, the Pandoc → ICM filter is far from a complete converter. It only converts a few elements (paragraph and character styles, table header and body cell types). The paragraph style names are automatically changed from the original Scrivener ones, so you can’t even simply import the .icml file into an InDesign template and have it match the existing styles. In the current status, I wouldn’t consider it as a real option.