Inspired by David Sparks and a Mac Power Users podcast on writing and workflows, here’s my workflow for delivering formatted Word files to my publisher via Scrivener, TextExpander, and some Script Fu.
I do all of my organizing, amalgamating, and writing tasks in Scrivener. I find that it is great for organizing my thoughts into sections in any given chapter. Using Scriv, my pet name, I can break up the manuscript any way that I want. Then, when I’m ready to send it off to my editor, I can compose my chapter for Word.
Unfortunately, the nature of my work requires that I use a ton of different formatting styles, defined in Word by my publisher. I need to apply different styles for code, figures, tables, etc. Word styles aren’t supported in Scriv, so I’ve devised a system of XML style tags to enclose text that should have a certain style in Word. I use TextExpander to quickly apply my XML tags using keyboard expansions (or Snippets in the parlance of TextExpander).
After I compile in Scriv, I open the resulting .rtf file in Word and run a custom script that I’ve developed to apply the appropriate style to text that is contained within my XML tags. The system has been working extremely well.
If anyone is interested in more details or wants a copy of my Word script, feel free to let me know in the comments or on Twitter (@pwalessi).
Good Luck with your writing projects!
