miércoles, 24 de febrero de 2016

Export from Scrivener to Ulysses in OS X

After a lot of trying to manage to export from Scrivener to Ulysses, I’ve found the best way to do that.

First of all, main problem happens because Scrivener uses RTF as internal text format and Ulysses plain text files with some variation of Markdown, that means you have the formatting directly embedded in the text instead of using some kind of binary stuff.
Second, Ulysses people haven’t implemented a direct import from the other program. I remember asked them and they said “no”. Not a plain no, of course, you never say no to a customer, but if you understand enough, you can see the “no” bright by itself.
And I still think that having that tool is a must because a lot of users are unhappy with last Scrivener decisions, and of course the lack of iOS version.
Personally I’ve been messing with both programs. I like Scrivener a lot because it is capable to work with multiple independent projects, but it is too complex (and ugly) to write blog posts and short stories.
I like Ulysses but I’ve found little bit unstable not caused by Ulysses, but the underlying layer of iCloud. It is simple enough for me, and is very beautiful, but I don’t like have all of my eggs in one not so solid plate, say iCloud.
Thus, I’ve been trying to be able to convert from Scrivener to Ulysses, mostly to not to have half a project in one side and the other half in another.
And finally, today, in a incredible great act of creativity and depth thinking (ironic way), I’ve found the way.
Pay attention, I’m only going to say once:
  1. Select the folder, or the entire project, or whatever you want to move into Ulysses.
  2. Go to Scrivener menu, select File -> Export >Files
  3. Select “Rich Text with Attachments” as format.
  4. Select a folder. You will get each Scrivener section in one file.
  5. Export them.
  6. Go to Ulysses.
  7. Select/Create destination folder. 
  8. Drop all the files into the central panel, at right side of the tree. 
  9. You will got one sheet for each Scrivener sheet, images and links included.
As a bonus, to publish a post written in Ulysses in Wordpress, select preview as Snippet HTML, open the preview pane, select all and copy into the clipboard.
Wordpress edit window will be very happy to accept your text respecting the format (bold, italic, links) but not the images.
(No, no me han jaqueado el sitio, ni me he vuelto anglófilo, ni nada de eso. Simplemente un experimento esto de escribir en inglés)