I’ve been exploring Scrivener. I loved the tutorial, I like the approach, I am keen to get going, part with my dollars and generally swing on a star. However. I just tried to set up a test project for a novel which, thus far, has been written in Word. On importing a bunch of standard Word .docs from Word for Mac 2004, I was a bit horror struck to find all sort of formatting code rendered on the page upon conversion. Would take ages to clean up - might as well copy and paste. But I did wonder if this is a known issue and whether or not there is much mileage in converting all the files in Word first to some other format?
RTF is definitely the best way to go if you want all elements to remain intact upon import. However, the formatting codes thing sounds as though the files you imported had no file extension. Scrivener uses the “.doc” or “.rtf” file extension to recognise the type of file and so determine what to do with it. Files with no file extension get imported as plain text - so rich text files with no file extension will get imported as plain text, meaning that you will see all of the formatting codes. Although Scrivener 2.0 will be a little smarter about trying to determine file types with no extension, because there is no one way of determining a file type on OS X, making sure files have the correction extension before import will always be the best way of ensuring import works properly.
All the best,
Keith