Problems importing from Word

[theresemarie]

I am new to Storyist and am having some trouble with my imports from Word. I saved my Word file as an RTF and was able to import it into Storyist only as I was going through the text I noticed all the apostrophes are missing. What am I doing wrong?

[Steve]

I am new to Storyist and am having some trouble with my imports from Word. I saved my Word file as an RTF and was able to import it into Storyist only as I was going through the text I noticed all the apostrophes are missing. What am I doing wrong?

 

Hi theresemarie,

 

This is a puzzling one. Let me ask a couple of questions.

 

1) Did the file you are importing originate on a Mac or a PC?

 

2) Are the apostrophes missing or simply represented by a strange character?

 

3) Are the apostrophes you are importing "smart" apostrophes?

 

If you want, you can send a small sample to support at storyist dot com and I'll take a look at it for you.

 

-Steve

[sjhill]

I too am having problems importing from Word. (The document was in Word, on my Mac.) I noticed that in some places (but not all) my dialog got re-formatted. Where there should be a tab indent for the start of a conversation, there isn't. Then the text skips a line before starting the other character's response, and does not indent. I can certainly take care of the space by deleting, but I can't get it to indent. What's up?

 

- Sjhill

[Steve]

I too am having problems importing from Word. (The document was in Word, on my Mac.) I noticed that in some places (but not all) my dialog got re-formatted. Where there should be a tab indent for the start of a conversation, there isn't. Then the text skips a line before starting the other character's response, and does not indent. I can certainly take care of the space by deleting, but I can't get it to indent. What's up?

 

- Sjhill

 

It depends on what settings you used for the import assistant, but sounds like you are using tab in your word document instead of a style with a first line indent to offset the first line of a paragraph. Since the default templates don't use tab (they use style definitions) to do that, there is no tab stop set.

 

Try adding a tab stop either by adding it to the paragraph or by adding it to the style definition.

 

If that doesn't work, I'd be happy to take a look at your document for you. I can provide instructions for replacing all the characters with, say the 'x' character if you want.

 

-Steve

[marguerite]

It depends on what settings you used for the import assistant, but sounds like you are using tab in your word document instead of a style with a first line indent to offset the first line of a paragraph. Since the default templates don't use tab (they use style definitions) to do that, there is no tab stop set.

 

Try adding a tab stop either by adding it to the paragraph or by adding it to the style definition.

 

If that doesn't work, I'd be happy to take a look at your document for you. I can provide instructions for replacing all the characters with, say the 'x' character if you want.

 

-Steve

BTW, something odd happened the last time I exported to Word: all the line breaks changed to (I'm guessing) soft line breaks. Word being its usual helpful self, I couldn't find any way to search for the soft line breaks and replace them with manual ones (I swear there was such a code in previous versions, but Microsoft seems to have buried it somewhere), so the result was that all my formatting was messed up.

 

Not a big problem in this case, because I was exporting a five-page file. If it had been a whole novel, though, I'd have been frothing at the mouth. I don't remember this ever happening with RTF export.

 

Ideas? Is this another MS feature designed to maximize PC compatibility at the expense of Mac user sanity?

Marguerite