Importing reads a manuscript file, determines its chapter and scene boundaries, and creates them in the Binder as separate documents that can be reordered and edited. An import is appended to the end of the Binder and overwrites nothing. The resulting split is shown for confirmation before anything is written.
What you can import
Four file types are read directly. Open the Binder and use the import button at the top of the panel.
- Word (.docx)
- Rich Text (.rtf)
- Markdown (.md)
- Plain text (.txt)
Everything else comes in through one of those four. The apps below all export to a supported format in two clicks, and nothing is lost in the step; Calamus reads the exported file exactly as it would a file you wrote in Word.
- Scrivener: Compile, then choose .docx or .rtf as the output format.
- Pages: File → Export To → Word.
- Google Docs: File → Download → Microsoft Word (.docx).
PDF is not supported, and this is deliberate rather than an omission. A PDF describes where ink sits on a page, not where a chapter begins, so any import from one would guess at your structure and guess badly. Export from whatever program made the PDF instead.
How the file is split
Calamus reads your headings, not your font sizes. A title you made big and bold by hand is, to a computer, an ordinary paragraph that happens to be large; a title styled Heading 1 is unambiguously a chapter title. The whole split depends on that difference.
- Heading 1 starts a new chapter, and its text becomes the chapter title.
- Heading 2 starts a new scene inside the current chapter, and its text becomes the scene title.
- Everything else is prose, and lands in the scene it falls under.
Any prose sitting above the first heading, an epigraph or a dedication or an opening page, is kept as its own chapter rather than discarded. Nothing in the file is thrown away because it was in an awkward place.
In Markdown and plain text, headings are the same idea written differently: a line beginning with # is a chapter, and a line beginning with ## is a scene. Bold and italic are preserved over. A .txt file with no # marks at all has no structure to find, so it imports as a single chapter.
Scene breaks
Most novelists don't title their scenes. They separate them with a typographic mark, and Calamus reads those too, so a chapter with three scene breaks becomes four scenes rather than one long document.
***or* * *#---
The mark has to sit alone on its own line, with nothing else in the paragraph. That rule is what keeps a line of dialogue that opens with a dash, or a sentence mentioning Room #4, from being mistaken for a break and cutting a scene in half. Break marks are removed as the scene is created, so they don't reappear in your prose.
A page break on its own doesn't start a new scene. A page break says where paper ends, which isn't the same as where a scene ends, and Word files use them for both. If your scenes are currently divided by page breaks alone, type a *** on the blank line before each one before you export.
Untitled scenes are named after their chapter and numbered in order, so a chapter called Ashfall becomes Ashfall, Ashfall (2), Ashfall (3). Rename them in the Binder whenever you like.
A note on Rich Text
RTF is worth understanding on its own, because it's the format Scrivener writes natively and the one many writers bring with them. RTF has no concept of a heading at all. It records that a line is bold and centered, but not that the line is a chapter title, so there are no headings for Calamus to read.
Chapters are therefore recovered heuristically. A short line with no sentence punctuation and beginning with Chapter, Part, Book, Prologue, Epilogue or Interlude is treated as a chapter title, as is a line consisting only of a number, in either Arabic or Roman form.
The heuristic is deliberately conservative. A bold sentence within a scene is left in place, on the basis that a paragraph wrongly extracted from a scene costs more to repair than a missed break, which is corrected by dragging one item. Where the recovery misses chapters, compile from Scrivener to .docx instead: Word files include heading styles and the split is exact.
What doesn't come across
Your words, paragraphs, bold, and italics all survive. Presentation does not, and that's the point: fonts, colors, margins, line spacing, and page setup belong to the file you exported, not to your manuscript. Calamus typesets the book itself at Compile, so page design you preserved in would only fight the design you choose there.
- Images are dropped. Add them to the book as real uploads, in the Moodboard or against the scene they belong to, where they can be managed.
- Comments are dropped, so notes you left for yourself in the margin of a Word file won't follow the prose in.
- Footnotes do come across, gathered into a numbered list at the end of the scene that contains them, with a marker left in the prose.
- Files must be under 25MB and must not be password-protected. Remove the password and export again.
Check the preview before you commit
Every import shows you the result first: how many chapters, how many scenes, the word count, and the title of each chapter it found. Nothing is saved until you confirm it.
This is the point at which a bad split is cheapest to correct. If a 90,000-word manuscript appears as a single chapter, the file included no headings: close the preview, apply Heading 1 to the chapter titles in the source document, export again, and import the new file. Correcting the same problem after confirming the import requires dismantling the Binder by hand.
Preparing a file that imports cleanly
- Style every chapter title as Heading 1.
- Style titled scenes as Heading 2, and separate untitled ones with
***on its own line. - Use the style menu rather than making a title big and bold by hand.
- Leave front matter and end matter out, or expect them as chapters; Calamus has its own place for a title page, copyright page, and dedication.
- Save or export as .docx wherever you have the choice.