Moving ywriter files to scrivener?

Points out the pitfalls of "writing software", that does.

You should be able to export the meat of it to RTF, a non-proprietary format, I would think. Extra notes and whatnot -- eh. *shrug* In my experience, fancy-arse software generally has no respect for freeware, or much of anything else not covered by its purchase price. You are expected to use it and only it, birth to death.

yWriter exports to RTF, HTML and a few other formats. It's a cut & paste job from there.

> Points out the pitfalls of "writing software", that does.

Yep. There are many ways to interpret text chunks and derive a software implementation around that. Each package makes its own data structures around paragraphs, scene, step, plot points, chapters, acts, parts, books, collection, and library. Even some packages even have timelines, sub-scenes, and such. Difficult to map one implementation's data structures to another package's.

-cb

I don't think there is any way to transfer data from scrivener to ywriter ,i think you have to copy and paste the whole data from scrivener to ywriter.

graceangela9 said:

I don't think there is any way to transfer data from scrivener to ywriter ,i think you have to copy and paste the whole data from scrivener to ywriter.

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If you're able to with scrivener (I don't have it, so I don't know), save it as an .rtf file, then import the file to yWriter. Makes it a lot easier than copying and pasting.

From a brief look up, you can save it as an .rtf file, which then, like I said, import it to yWriter.

ETA: But she or he isn't asking about scrivener to yWriter (I don't think), so yeah.

yWriter already saves its files in rtf format.
Look in your yWriter project folder, and under that, look in the /rtf5 folder where you will find the complete text of all your scenes in rtf format.

Other things, like character info and project notes you will probably have to cut and paste.

Matera the Mad said:

Points out the pitfalls of "writing software", that does.

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Actually, one reason I like Scrivener is that if you split open a scrivener project (which is a Bundle on Mac OS X -- a directory that appears as a file -- or just a directory on Windows), all the individual scenes are just stored as standard RTFs. The notes on a given scene are stored as a .txt file.

Keith (the developer) has said before he did that deliberately, because if someone decides Scriv isn't for them, they should be able to get their data back out without having to use a third-party tool, and it means interoperability is easier.

I thought yWriter also used RTF as its backing store for much the same reason, but I've never used yWriter so I can't really speak to that.

AlexPiper said:

I thought yWriter also used RTF as its backing store for much the same reason, but I've never used yWriter so I can't really speak to that.

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Yes yWriter does the same thing. Rtf files in folder and settings stored in a .yw5 file which is just a text file you can open in any wordprocessor.