I apologise if this is a subject that has already been dealt with, but I did a search in the Wish List and couldn’t come up with anything…
I would very much like to be able to import Word documents AS word documents (.docx), not as translations to RTF. There are documents (to wit, drafts with my editor’s corrections and comments, plus my replies) that just do not come through correctly when translated to RTF. The author tags are stripped from comments. Only one comment in a thread is preserved. I do NOT want to edit these; rather I want to have them as references. Ideally, I would like to import them, intact, into the Research folder just as I do spreadsheets, PDFs, mind maps, and Aeon Timeline documents.
I do have an external archive of these, but yes, I would really like to have them handy in Scrivener. I’ve tried importing them as aliases–they’re greyed out. A straight import always converts them. If there is already a way to do this, please enlighten me!
Not at a Mac right now to test anything, but perhaps these Scrivener 2 workarounds might still work and go some way help you (though far from being what you want):
There is an unofficial way of doing just what you are asking for: import an alias pointing to the .docx, not the .docx itself. The result will be read-only, providing a Quick Look preview of the file (and as such will have limited usefulness in that it won’t be indexed and is not interactive in any way), but it will remain in the original format, untouched by any conversion, and capable of being loaded using external editors.
Ideally, I would prefer the “print to PDF with comments” solution. There’s just one problem: I don’t actually own Word. I’ve abandoned all Microsoft products for some time, and depend on OpenOffice. It works remarkably well for the most part, but printing (to PDF, or anything else) with comments (on the Mac, at least) currently doesn’t print and locks the application into an infinite loop.
Therefore, the solutions of importing a link as a document reference or of creating an alias and importing the alias to the binder are both very interesting. I’ve never had a use for document references before, so it may take some getting-used-to time, and I may decide it’s something I’d rather do without. But aliases may suit my way of working very well. I’ll try them both.Thanks again to all who replied!
Thanks to both scshrugged and joro for the Pages suggestions! I’m not a Pages user in general though it has the advantage that I needn’t pay Apple (more than the cost of my Mac) to use it.
Pages doesn’t seem to be able to print comments any more than OpenOffice can, so the Pages to PDF method won’t work for me. (If you know how to get Pages to print comments, do tell!)
Ideally, I’d like to be able to save a PDF with comments visible, and import the PDF. Failing that, importing the Word files directly or as aliases ( as joro suggests with Pages) was my second option. But I just tried the “import Finder aliases” suggestion, and it works just as well as the Pages import idea, which I also just tried. The alias method has two advantages: I can use my familiar OpenOffice and it doesn’t inflate my project size.
So problem sorted, and thanks again to all who contributed!
I’ve abandoned all Microsoft products for some time, and depend on OpenOffice. It works remarkably well for the most part, but printing (to PDF, or anything else) with comments (on the Mac, at least) currently doesn’t print and locks the application into an infinite loop.