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.
Hello, all.
I have completed a large book (novel) in Scrivener and am considering using Affinity Publisher to format it for print.
I want to find an efficient workflow with the fewest steps between Scrivener doc and the print-ready doc.
Someone on the Affinity forum suggested that Scrivener documents are essentially RTF documents, and they claimed to be able to open the Scrivener document in Affinity Publisher. I was not able to repeat their results. Affinity Publisher does not recognize .scriv as a valid file format.
My desire would be to NOT have to do the intermediate step - compiling to a compatible format and then placing or opening the file in Affinity Publisher.
Also, it would be great if there was a decent print preview function in Scrivener that didn’t involve compiling output, then trying to figure out what went wrong, then returning to Scrivener to make the adjustments, then compiling output again. I have quite a stack of compiles that are useless, as they are versions with errors that are later corrected in the next compiled versions.
I’m finding that tracking last-minute changes is a bit awkward with the Scrivener source doc, the intermediate Word doc, and then the final file that the publishing software creates.
Can a Scrivener doc open in Affinity Publisher?
If not, what is the fastest and least destructive way to do this?
Thanks!
It’s a mixup of terms. Every text in Scrivener’s Drafts folder is “essentially RTF”. And Affinity Publisher can open each one of them. But to what use?
The compiled output could be RTF and then Affinity Publisher could open it. But that’s not what you mean.
You are referring to Scrivener projects which only appear (on Macs) as files. Actually they are packages containing lots of files, for example the RTF files in the Drafts folder, Research files of different kinds, snapshots, and a number of internal files. Affinity Publisher can not open all of these files at once and put them together. If it could, it would be Scrivener.
It would be awesome if the Affinity Publisher format was open and documented and if Scrivener could compile to it directly. But it is not. Hence the very common docx as the recommended input format for Affinity Publisher.
That does not make any sense. Before Compile the output document does not exist. The text is in the Drafts folder, true, but the Compile format gives it a specific look, creates chapter numbering, etc. And Compile also determines which items in the Drafts folder gets into the output—everything, or certain items are manually excluded, or only a collection, etc.
Then why keep them?
When they are actual last-minute changes make them in Affinity Publisher. Corrections in the galley proofs are a very common practice.
And by the way: Having a text in more than one form very often helps to spot typos and incorrect punctuation and even poor wording in the first place. When we look at a text long enough/too long we tend to overlook things and see others that we only think are there. If we read the same text in a different font, font size, or with a different line wrapping that works like a reset for our minds and makes mistakes visible that have been there all the time.[1]
For me having my Mac read a text to me, mechanical as it still sounds, works too, at least with short texts.
I remember a version of iA Writer that had a writing and a proofreading and an editing mode, each with a different font to address this peculiarity of the human brain. ↩︎
uavito,
Thanks for taking the time to respond to my questions. I misinterpreted what another user was saying. Yes, Scrivener projects do contain those individual files. It’s a shame that the project can’t be uploaded directly into Affinity Publisher. I assume that is also true of Adobe InDesign. As for keeping the copies, I’m not the only person working on a given project, and others of us like to have copious copies to go back to.
Ultimately, it seems the answer is to do a compile to get a .docx file, then use that to place in Affinity Publisher (heavy sigh).
Thanks again for taking the time to give your views on this.
This is tangential but rather than start a new topic I’ll post here.
I have an academic document which will run to some 60 pages and is full of footnotes. My main question is, how do people deal with footnotes in Publisher? I normally compile to RTF and clean up any glitches using Nisus Writer.
Is it necessary to create a template with separate text areas for footnotes or is there a way of importing such that the creation of footnote areas is automatic? How do you deal with markers within the body text?
I get the feeling it is probably easier to convert to endnotes and place these at the end of the document…
I did try a search of their forums, but missed the link you suggest. There are academic users on here who use Publisher so I thought it worth a try since my document originates in Scriv.
Thanks for the link - I’ll hop over to the Affinity site.
uavito,