Scrivener is a great product and if it was all I had to use I would be very happy to do so but I am a Microsoft kid and, whilst Office is terrible for managing a project, as a document editor Word reigns supreme (my opinion only).
I therefore edit my documents in Word … in practice what I do is copy/paste a document into word from Scrivener, edit it as I wish, then copy/paste it back. Because I have good access to MS products (I’m in IT) this isn’t a problem but I’m sure this rationale could easily apply to any other editor.
“Open in other editor” means something else (split screen) in Scrivener but, though it may well be that this functionality exists elsewhere in the application, would it not be possible to have some means (perhaps a context menu when one right-clicks a document/folder within Scrivener) where one could select “Edit in Alternate Editor”? Perhaps the Editor could be configured elsewhere so that clicking such a link would launch that document in the user’s editor of choice then, when they save it, it could automatically return to Scrivener.
I may well be being naïve, other editors (Word included), may not be able to do the copy back bit but that’s my idea
There is in fact already a command for this, Documents/Open/in External Editor (Ctrl-F5 by default). However, this won’t work for text, only “research” files like Photoshop or PDF files—that’s because Scrivener uses its own internal codes for its feature set, meaning that editing files externally could, at the worst, cause data loss. So yes, copy and paste is going to be the best way to do this. You may be able to find a workflow that enhances that concept a bit, perhaps using something like AutoHotKey to build a “macro” that handles the details for you.
Yes, the trouble is that even if Scrivener acted as a read-only viewer of Word files that you then opened and edited in Word, Scrivener wouldn’t be able to compile them into a single document, since Word documents have different features to Scrivener documents. So you could format and add things in Word that would be lost when compiling in Scrivener, and the entire point of Scrivener is to allow you to build up a text hat you compile.
Sure though that’s just discipline on the author’s part? I mean don’t I run the same risk with copy 'n paste? When I paste back I just check to make sure it all looks OK and I nearly always have to “redo” bulleted lists because they don’t come across too brilliantly from Word.
OK … though it’s a shame in my opinion, Scrivener is good at what it does but in one sense has no choice but to be a jack-of-all-trades whereas as some applications are masters of one.
Given that Scrivener saves documents in RTF format which, coincidentally, is the format I use with Word (I’m slightly paranoid about macros unless I write them myself) I don’t quite get why there would be a real issue.
Not really. Suppose you had your Word documents set up to show columns, with images arranged in the text so that text flowed around them, and suppose you had text boxes and other such elements in the text. All of that would be stripped out during Scrivener’s Compile, because Scrivener’s Compile can only support the RTF features that Scrivener’s editor can support. So it would render Scrivener’s Compile feature pretty much useless if you were using lots of advanced features in Word that aren’t supported by Scrivener. This would result in a lot of bug reports from users who didn’t understand why this is the case, and as Scrivener’s whole raison d’etre - or at least a large part of it -this would all be very misleading.
Because different RTF editors support different features, and Scrivener and Word have greatly different support. So I’m afraid this is something that is definitely never going to be supported in Scrivener, as Scrivener is built to be a writing environment, not as a store house for documents edited in other word processors, and all of its core features are built around this.
