REALLY round-tripping your Scrivener articles
When I’m working with my editors they all use their own (weird) system for articles. One wants me to send a Word document, another one prefers HTML, another one RTF…. I probably won’t have to say this is no pleasure at all (I’m writing in Markdown).
Luckily Scrivener is capable of exporting almost all of these formats. But what happens when an editor sends his revised version back?
Luckily there is a tool named pandoc available. pandoc allows you to convert text files from many formats to many formats. Unfortunately it can’t read RTF and Word directly, but here’s my trick:
- Open the document in Word/TextEdit/OpenOffice.
- Save the document as HTML (A format that (hopefully) comes close to the document).
- Open Terminal and type:
pandoc -t markdown -o myarticle.md myarticle.html - Import to Scrivener.
The only downside of this method is that you’re going to lose some formatting, like underlined text, but the most part remains intact. This way you should be able to apply the changes more easily.