Importing and exporting word documents

Awesome! Very excited about this 😄

We think we're becoming ready for the alpha this week. But a little kink has arisen of something we have to refactor now. Besides that, we only have to do the document upgrader and some of the videos, which indicates that we're close to the end.

Good news Per, can’t wait to see v3.0. Any ETA on when we will see it?

cheers

cathy

Ah thanks Jeff, good to know!

cathy

We just need to get 3.0 out and stable, and this is one of the only things that will be allowed to get in front of collaboration.

While I can't wait for the Word export function too, I've found it works ok to export as HTML and then open with Word. It seems to carry across all the formatting, indents, chapter headings etc. The only thing I need to change are the margins, which is a two second job. Totally awesome program!

That's great, so that could be an option in the import dialog. Super tip!

Hi Per,

there is a way which is the scene delimiter generally three *** which novelists use between scenes. This is pretty much standard practice. Novelists insert these between scenes within a chapter. Chapters are recognised by headings formatting. That is how it is done in other writing programs importing from word.

cheers

cathy

I think this will be the first version of Word import/export, which only specifically includes the things that we handle. After all, a novel to be submitted to a publisher doesn't include a lot of fonts and emojis and pictures. It stops at bold/italic/underline, and maybe a font for chapter and section headings.

There is a great problem with Word importing which is as of yet unresolved, which is how to break it into beats. With screenplays it's easy, because a scene is a natural delimiter that's guaranteed to be present every few pages max. Since the script is broken into a bunch of mini-text-editors, we'd like to not import a Word document into one 300-page beat and then ask you to break it up.

But it's difficult to come up with some logic for how to break it up. For sure we can break at chapter marks. Besides that, are there any cues in a typically formatted novel we could use? Or would it work to simply break every e.g. 10 paragraphs? The problem with arbitrary breaking is that it forces you to merge all those beats and then break them again in a better place.

So one idea that has been floated is that you ask people to pre-break the document by inserting some text every time there's a beat, e.g. "=====". The problem I foresee with that is that nobody is going to do it. And by the time they realize that they should have done it, they'll have done too much work in Causality and can't just re-import. So this idea seems a bit dead to me.

We need to come up with a way to data-mine the text to break it into beats. Please post if you notice any cues that could be used.

I agree that doc export would be useful (for me, moreso than input - and I imagine export is simpler to code), but I do think it could be pretty rudimentary. While all the header/footer details listed by Cathy would be great, even a basic export function would be great - just text, broken sensibly, with bold/italics etc carried across. When I've used Causality for book writing, I've used beats as story moments, and blocks as scene markers, with chapter and act breaks as (unsurprisingly) chapter and act breaks. I think an export which ignored everything below Chapter level could still be useful - or a function could be added for inserting a 'dinkus' break (what I believe that row of asterisks is called), and that could be the sub-chapter level break.

Excited to see the 3.0 developments!

Yes, exporting your script to DOCX is very important.

Of all the scripting software I know, Causality is the only one that doesn't know how to export a script to DOCX.

Adding and formatting a title page, re-numbering pages or scenes, adding a character bible, removing some special characters, such as (CONT'D) - these tasks become extremely difficult and time-consuming.

The PDF script cannot be edited properly.

Conversion of a script from a PDF file to the DOCX format does not work completely correctly. Spaces between words may disappear and other problems may arise.

As a result, in order to make minor changes to the script formatting at the request of the studio, I have to first check the entire text for errors after converting from PDF to DOCX. It is very uncomfortable.

As of today, you do not have the ability to format the script within the program.

You won't be able to meet the requirements of all studios and all script editors around the world. In many cases, the final document will still require revision.

It seems to me that to solve this problem, it is easier to export the script to DOCX.

Sorry for my english

I believe so. I want to try to keep this task at the top of the list, alongside collaboration.

But quick focus group: How many features are we really talking about getting in and out of a word document? A novel is typically just Times New Roman with 1" margins and not a lot of fluff. It's not rocket science to support importing the basic text plus a couple of headings to map to chapters and acts. Am I right in assuming that the formatting we need to support is pretty basic?

And secondly, there's a fundamental problem in where to break text into snippets. In screenwriting, you have natural boundaries at scenes, so it's easy to decide where to create the initial beats. In a novel, it's very difficult to choose where to break into beats, and we do have to break into beats, or you'd have 200-page beats.

Is there any kind of natural pattern you notice in where you break long text into beats? Something a computer could recognize?

Thanks for the reply. Let's hope you can get to it soon. Do you think it will be delivered within the next 3-6 months or longer? It's a showstopper for novelists without it. But Causality is such a wonderful tool for plotting I'd love to promote it to novel writers, however without a way to get the book out of the platform it lacks cred as a tool for novels.

cheers

Cathy

I agree this is something that's important. We've neglected it in the interest of doing one thing well (screenwriting) rather than two things half-assed. But I understand the problem.

Importing initially. But both are needed to make the platform useful for writers 😊 if you’re able to provide it as soon as possible it will be great. Basically if I develop a novel in Causality I need to be able to get it out to publish it as an ebook and without DOCX that is impossible, because I can’t load a PDF to a publishing platform and convert it to an ebook. So both are needed 😊

Hi Cathy,

We're trying to wrap 3.0, and then after that, it's supposed to be all sync and collaboration until we have it. But I agree that the lack of DOCX in/out makes Causality a lot less useful for authors, and we have to keep it at the top of the list.

Is importing or exporting more important to you? One has to go first.