Have a Good Life

In writing my book, I used Markdown as I was writing it to force me to focus on the content, or else I would never get it done. I didn’t start playing around with fonts, and colors, and design until the actual writing was in to be reviewed by a trusted friend.

I had a really hard time getting the Markdown text out of Scrivener into a readable format with the pictures that I had linked in. I needed the format to go to Word so that I could insert chapters into iBooks Author.

When I compiled from Scrivener to Word, I got markdown formatted text, not RTF (and no pictures)

When I compiled from Scrivener to RTF, I got rich text, formatted how I wanted, but without pictures.

When I compiled from Scrivener to PDF, I got rich text, formatted how I wanted, with pictures, but when I copied and pasted it, the pictures all went to the last ten pages, which would have required more work than I wanted.

When I compiled from Scrivener to TXT, it gave me just what I had written in Scrivener.

When I exported to OPML, I got a really cool Mind Map of my whole book!

To get what I needed, I had to go to and download the Drag and Drop apps (all the way at the bottom) from Fletcher Penney’s github site. When I did that, I dragged my Scrivener-exported .txt file onto the HTML app, and it converted it to HTML for me. I opened that up and copied the styled text from the web browser, and pasted it into a Word doc. It got all the formatting how I set it up in Markdown, and made it easy for me to get it out into chapters to be imported into iBooks Author.

I realize now that I could have compiled from Scrivener to HTML and been totally fine with what I needed. Live and learn, right?

As a side note, I really like iBooks Author. It makes even what I am doing look fairly decent!

Have a Good Life.