Setting up a proper manuscript in Page

[thealtruismsociety]

Yeah don't know if I can post this here but unless Storyist becomes available on an iPad, gonna be using Pages in the near future. I'm having issues setting up a proper template though for the Manuscript, anyone know this program well enough to help and write a tutorial?

[Steve]

Yeah don't know if I can post this here but unless Storyist becomes available on an iPad, gonna be using Pages in the near future. I'm having issues setting up a proper template though for the Manuscript, anyone know this program well enough to help and write a tutorial?

 

Just export the Storyist novel template and import it into Pages.

 

-Steve

[thealtruismsociety]

Just export the Storyist novel template and import it into Pages.

 

-Steve

 

Hey Steve, export it as what? Word, txt etc? I tried as Word and it looks borked lol.

[marguerite]

Hey Steve, export it as what? Word, txt etc? I tried as Word and it looks borked lol.

RTF. It should preserve the styles.

Best,

M

[marguerite]

If it doesn't work the first time, make the Export Assistant walk you through the steps, and on the first window after it asks you to choose the workflow, tell it to map "Section Text" to "Section Text," etc. Also leave the dummy text for the template in place, which will make it easier to adjust the styles in Pages before you save it as a Pages template.

M

[Steve]

RTF. It should preserve the styles.

 

Unfortunately, Pages doesn't recognize styles when it imports or exports RTF, so the process is more involved. You can either go through Word or create the styles in Pages by selecting the Chapter Title, Section Text, and Section Separator text and using the "Create New Paragraph Style From Selection" command in Pages.

 

I opted for the first.

 

1. Create a new project from the Novel template in Storyist.

2. Export the manuscript as RTF. I didn't use the export assistant.

3. Open the RTF file in Word.

4. Save the file as .docx.

5. Open the .docx file in Pages.

6. Save as a Pages file.

 

See the attachment

 

Note: Pages seems to ignore the "Before Paragraph" spacing attribute if the paragraph is the first one on the page. I'm not sure how one would start the chapter title a third of the way down.

 

-Steve

Novel.pages.zip

[thealtruismsociety]

Unfortunately, Pages doesn't recognize styles when it imports or exports RTF, so the process is more involved. You can either go through Word or create the styles in Pages by selecting the Chapter Title, Section Text, and Section Separator text and using the "Create New Paragraph Style From Selection" command in Pages.

 

I opted for the first.

 

1. Create a new project from the Novel template in Storyist.

2. Export the manuscript as RTF. I didn't use the export assistant.

3. Open the RTF file in Word.

4. Save the file as .docx.

5. Open the .docx file in Pages.

6. Save as a Pages file.

 

See the attachment

 

Note: Pages seems to ignore the "Before Paragraph" spacing attribute if the paragraph is the first one on the page. I'm not sure how one would start the chapter title a third of the way down.

 

-Steve

 

Hmm I see that ...

[marguerite]

Note: Pages seems to ignore the "Before Paragraph" spacing attribute if the paragraph is the first one on the page. I'm not sure how one would start the chapter title a third of the way down.

-Steve

If the issue is starting the page where you want it, I think I have a solution: actually two solutions.

 

1. (Works best on first page). Open your text file in Pages '09 and set up the styles as you want them. (I had no luck with Pages matching the original styles even when I went from Storyist through Word, so you might as well just read in the RTF file and go from there: Pages keeps the formatting but not the style definitions. Set it up once and save it as a template, since it's not so many styles.) When you have the styles set up and applied, click on the Inspector button to open it and then click the Layout tab. At the bottom left, you can tell Pages to add, say, 1" to the top margin for that page. Adjust the numbers till you get the effect you want.

 

2. (Quickest for inner chapter breaks). Set up your Chapter Title style to have, say, 72 points before (72 points = 1 inch). Then set up a second style called Chapter Title Spacing. For that style, choose More under Text in the Inspector and click on the check box next to "Page break before." Each time you come to a chapter break, add a blank line before the title/number and style it as Chapter Title Spacing. That will bump the chapter to the next page and, because Chapter Title is no longer the first line on the page, add your space before it to push it down the page. Before you read the file back into Storyist, use Pages to select all the paragraphs marked as Chapter Title Spacing and delete them.

 

But you may still have to restyle your text by hand when you get it back into Storyist, unless you read it into Word first and use Word as a bridge to save styled RTF. Fortunately, creating a .doc file from Pages is easy....

Best,

M

[marguerite]

Update: Pages does recognize Word styles if you copy and paste the file. Same is true for RTF (open Storyist's RTF file in Word, copy the part you want, paste into a blank Pages document, and it imports the styles too). Also, this time I was able to open a .doc file in Pages and have it import the styles directly.

 

Something similar happens on the way back: if you export the Pages file to RTF, it loses all its style definitions and, although it retains the formatting, everything becomes a version of "Normal." But if you save a copy as .doc, open it in Word, and save that as RTF, then import it into Storyist, the styles come along for the ride.

 

One way around that antisocial behavior is to make sure you base your new file on the Novel Template, then run the Import Assistant in Storyist and match what you can (basically Body Text and Default Style to Section Text) before importing. Then you just have to hunt down the chapter titles and section separators (which Storyist recognizes even though they're assigned the Section Text tag) and fix them within your .story file.

 

BUT the one drawback of all these import strategies is that Storyist can see where your section breaks are but not what you originally called them: everything comes in as "UNTITLED" (chapters) or "Untitled" (sections). Not so bad if you have 10 sections, but when you have 150?

 

So Pages to Storyist is still a work in progress....

Marguerite