Importing from Scrivener

Your whole Scrivener 3 novel (Mac or Windows) arrives as a new Penpoint book: chapters, scenes, notes, keywords, comments, snapshots, and the character and place pages in your binder (the folder list down the left side of Scrivener’s window).

In short:

1. Find your project in Scrivener.
2. On Your Books, choose Create New Book, then Import a Scrivener Project.
3. Pick the project.
4. Answer a few screens and click Import.

Before You Start

• Use a Scrivener 3 project. If Scrivener 2 (Mac) or Scrivener 1 (Windows) last saved it, open it once in Scrivener 3, which offers to update it and saves a copy of the old version beside it. Import the updated project, not that copy.
• If your project is in iCloud Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox, keep it on this computer first. It only keeps a copy here; it deletes nothing. On a Mac with iCloud Drive, Control-click the project and choose Keep Downloaded. In OneDrive, choose Always keep on this device. In Dropbox, choose Make available offline. A project from Scrivener for iPad or iPhone lives in Dropbox’s Apps/Scrivener folder; import it from there once it has synced.
• Pick your real project, not a Scrivener backup (a file ending in .zip).

Step 1: Find Your Project

1. Open the project in Scrivener.
2. Choose File > Show Project in Finder (Mac) or File > Show Project in File Explorer (Windows). A folder window opens with your project selected.
3. Note which folder it is in (usually Documents, if you never picked a spot).
4. Close the project in Scrivener. If it’s still open, Penpoint might miss your latest typing. Nothing in Scrivener is harmed either way.

Step 2: Start the Import

1. Go to the Your Books screen. If a book is open, Penpoint saves it first and returns you to your library.
2. Click the Create New Book card at the end of your books (dashed outline, plus sign). You can also right-click (or Control-click on a Mac) an empty spot on the screen and choose Create New Book.
3. In the window titled New Book, click Import a Scrivener Project.

Step 3: Choose Your Project

A file window titled Import a Scrivener Project opens. Go to the folder you noted in Step 1. Picked the wrong thing? You just see a message and can choose again; nothing changes.

On a Mac

Select the .scriv project itself, for example A Study in Scarlet.scriv, and click Open.

On Windows and Linux

A Scrivener project is an ordinary folder with a .scrivx main file inside.

1. Double-click the .scriv folder to open it.
2. Select the one file inside (A Study in Scarlet.scrivx) and click Open.

Penpoint shows Reading your project... for a few seconds, longer for a big project. If you close the file window without choosing anything, you return to the New Book window and nothing is created.

Moving Through the Screens

On every remaining screen, Cancel is at the bottom left; Back and Next are at the bottom right. On the first screen, Back reads Choose another project. Until you click Import on the Review screen, you can go back and change any choice.

Step 4: Your Manuscript

Penpoint reads your Draft folder (called Manuscript in many projects) and sorts its items into parts, chapters, and scenes. Each row shows a Part, Chapter, or Scene tag and its word count.

• Several drafts: Penpoint asks which one is your current draft (the likeliest is preselected). The others come into your Notebook (Penpoint’s place for notes and research); untick Also bring my other drafts into the Notebook to leave them behind.
• Chapters are: if Penpoint guessed wrong, open this menu and pick the choice that matches your chapter folders, such as Folders like "Chapter Two".
• The checkboxes: a tick means it becomes a chapter or scene. Penpoint pre-ticks what you had set to Include in Compile in Scrivener. Unticked items go to your Notebook (in a folder called Left out of your Scrivener manuscript), and unticking a folder unticks everything inside it.
• Check the line under the list, which totals what you ticked, such as 3 chapters, 4 scenes, 8,390 words (w means words).

Click Next.

Step 5: Point to Your Folders

Tell Penpoint which folders hold characters, places, items, or general notes. Scrivener has no “character” or “place” type, so Penpoint guesses and you confirm.

Each unlocked folder has a dropdown with five choices:

• Characters: each document in the folder becomes one character.
• Locations: each document becomes one location. A place holding other places keeps them inside it, like a city holding its streets.
• Items (objects that matter to your story, like a locket): each document becomes one item.
• Notes: the folder comes into your Notebook.
• Skip: the folder is left out of Penpoint and stays in Scrivener.

• A small gray line under a folder says why Penpoint guessed it, and its documents show what they’ll become, such as Becomes a Character.
• A small padlock means Penpoint has decided this one: your Research folder always comes in as notes (you can still change the folders inside it), and Scrivener’s blank template sheets are skipped.
• If a folder holds whole earlier versions of your book (Previous Versions, V2 to V11), its row reads Previous versions, and each version arrives in your Notebook as its own folder of notes.

Click Next.

Step 6: Name Your Book

Penpoint fills in your Scrivener project’s name. Change it if you like, and choose how the book looks in your library. You can change all of this later.

• Book Name: up to 50 characters. It can’t match a book you already have, and can’t use these symbols: < > / \ | *. Next stays dimmed until the name works.
• Description: optional, up to 100 characters.
• Book Color, Texture, and Cover Image (upload a picture and crop it). A live Preview shows the card as you go.

Click Next.

Step 7: Review & Import

This is the last stop before anything is written. The defaults suit most writers.

• What will be created: counts of everything coming over, including tags (Penpoint’s version of Scrivener keywords).
• Manuscript options:
  • Bring in scene titles is ticked by default; untick it if your scene titles are only drafting labels (chapter titles are never affected).
  • Also bring in labels and statuses as tags is off by default, since they are often out of date.
  • Use as chapter subtitle appears only when your chapters carry a custom field you added in Scrivener; pick it to make its value each chapter’s subtitle.
• What won’t be imported, if there is anything to list, and Warnings. Warnings are worth a look but don’t stop the import. See What Stays in Scrivener below.

Click Import. A progress bar names what is being copied; larger projects take longer. Leave Penpoint open until it finishes.

If something goes wrong, a red message appears on the Review screen and Penpoint removes the unfinished book. Your Scrivener project is untouched. Click Import to try again, or Back to change a choice.

Step 8: Import Complete

The finished screen tallies what came over. If anything went to the Notebook, a line says where: under Imported from Scrivener: (your book’s name). Not imported and Warnings list what did not come across.

• Open my book opens the new book. Not sure? Choose this one; you can run the scanner later.
• Find them in your chapters opens the book in Manuscript Mode (where you write your chapters) with the Manuscript Scanner running over all your imported chapters at once. It finds your characters, places, and items by name (even ones not in any folder) and links them to their chapters. You review what it found before anything is applied, and it doesn’t change your writing.

To run the scanner later, open Manuscript Mode, right-click your book's name at the top of the chapter outline on the left, and choose Scan Manuscript for Content. See Chapter Scanner for how reviewing matches works (one chapter at a time).

Check a chapter or two against Scrivener. Your project stays where it was; changes in one app don’t flow to the other. To look around first, click Close to stay on the Your Books screen, where your new book is waiting.

What Comes Over

Your manuscript

• Fonts, text sizes, and text colors don’t come over; Penpoint uses its own.
• Chapters, parts, and scenes: Draft folders become parts, chapters, and scenes using your binder titles; an untitled chapter takes the first words of its text as its title.
• Scene text and formatting: bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, highlighting, lists, block quotes, and headings. Headings come from styles with Heading or Title in the name (scenes keep two heading levels), and block quotes from styles named Block Quote.
• Synopsis (index card text) and document notes: a chapter’s synopsis becomes its subtitle and a scene’s its Description; a scene’s notes become its Notes and a chapter’s its author notes.
• Labels and statuses: a label becomes a color (the nearest of Penpoint’s twelve). Statuses map to Penpoint’s four (Draft, Revised, Polished, Final): names like First Draft become Draft, Second Draft becomes Revised, Final Draft, Done, and Complete become Final, and anything else becomes Draft (No Status stays unset). The optional Review checkbox also makes tags from label and status names (a label that is only a color word, such as Red, is skipped).
• Keywords: become tags (nested keywords stay grouped) and stay attached to their chapters, scenes, characters, locations, items, and notes.
• Comments & Pinned Notes: Scrivener comments, footnotes, and inline annotations become comments attached to the same words (footnotes start with "Footnote:"). In notes and character pages, comments go at the end under a Comments heading.
• Scene Drafts (saved earlier versions of a scene, like Scrivener's snapshots): each snapshot becomes one, named for the snapshot and dated to match. Penpoint keeps the newest 100 per document and tells you if older ones were left behind.
• Images, links, and tables: pictures in your text (PNG or JPEG) become inline images. Web links stay links, and links to another Scrivener document that came over link to that page in notes, a scene’s Notes, and character, location, and item pages; in scene text only the link words stay. A table in a note stays a table; in a scene, each row becomes a line of text.
• Custom fields: become “Field: value” lines in a chapter’s author notes, a note, or a character’s bio, unless you chose one as the chapter subtitle.

Your world

• Characters: a document in a Characters folder becomes a character, its text going into the Bio. Lines using Scrivener’s template labels (Age, Occupation) fill the matching character sheet fields when your book has a field with that name; the rest stays in the Bio. A folder with its own text plus sub-documents becomes one character, each sub-document under its own heading. The first picture in the character’s binder folder becomes the profile picture (PNG or JPEG).
• Locations and items: the document text becomes the description, and a picture in its binder folder the profile picture.
• Notebook notes: everything left as Notes, plus Research, front and back matter, other drafts (in Other drafts), and unticked manuscript documents (in Left out of your Scrivener manuscript). Each document becomes a note, with its synopsis and notes under Synopsis and Notes headings; picture items become Notebook images captioned with the synopsis.

What Stays in Scrivener

• The Trash: not copied, and still safe in Scrivener. Drag items out first if you want them.
• Blank character or location sheets: an untouched Scrivener template is skipped and listed under What won’t be imported.
• PDFs, audio and video, and web pages: listed by name and location, since Penpoint has no home for them.
• Collections, project bookmarks, and writing targets: listed under What won’t be imported.
• Compile formats and layout settings: left in Scrivener. Penpoint only reads which documents you had ticked to compile.
• Screenplay layout: a Screenplay project comes in as ordinary paragraphs; the words stay, the script layout does not.
• Compile placeholders: special codes like <$PROJECTTITLE> come in as plain text, and the Review screen counts how many it found.

Importing Into a Series

Skip this if you are importing a single book. A series is a set of books that share one cast and world.

• Start from the shelf: on the Your Books screen, click the series' stacked card to open its shelf, then click the Add Book to Series card. The window is titled Add a Book to followed by your series name and offers the same Import a Scrivener Project choice; the other steps are the same except as below. See Your Series in the Library for the shelf.
• Step 5: a name that matches a character, location, or item already in your series shows Linked to (name) from your series, and your Scrivener text is added to that entry instead of making a duplicate. The match ignores capital letters and extra spaces, and applies only when exactly one entry has that name. Click Unlink for a separate entry instead. Names with no match show New.
• Step 8: the Notebook folder sits inside the new Book’s own notes folder, and Open my book opens the series with the new Book selected.
• Scene synopses and notes: if the series’ scene layout has no Description or Notes field, they go to your Notebook instead, in a Scene notes folder, and the Import Complete screen says so.

Troubleshooting

“This project was made with an older version of Scrivener”

Update it in Scrivener 3 (see Before You Start). Then click Choose another project and pick the updated project, not the old-version copy beside it.

“That doesn’t look like a Scrivener project folder”

Penpoint could not find the project’s main file. Redo Step 3: the .scrivx file on Windows and Linux, the .scriv project itself on a Mac. For a backup (a .zip file), extract it first and import the project inside.

“This Scrivener project couldn’t be read”

Close it in Scrivener, make sure it is fully downloaded if it lives in a cloud folder, and try again. If it still fails, copy the project into a plain folder such as Documents (in Finder or File Explorer, choose Copy on the project, then Paste inside Documents) and import the copy.

Some scenes came in empty

Usually the project had not fully downloaded from a cloud folder. Make it available offline and import again under a different name (two books cannot share one).

Once you are happy with the second book, delete the first Penpoint copy on the Your Books screen (see Deleting Books), never the Scrivener project.

The import failed

See Step 7. If an unfinished book ever does remain on the Your Books screen, delete it (see Deleting Books) and try again.

Still stuck? Open the (?) help menu and choose Contact Support. It is in the top bar inside a book, and on the Your Books screen too.