Importing a large manuscript from Word / DOCX into a new project

[Syulang]

Hi all,

I’ve got a sizable manuscript (~46,000 words) for a book project that I want to bring in and finish off in Papyrus, as Word is getting difficult to project manage. It’s already had some formatting and annotation done.

Is there a walk-through or guide out there on the best way to bring it in and help clean up the formatting? I’d be happy (and ideally prefer) to loose the formatting, as it’s a bit of a mess, but don’t want to loose the notes, and the special characters in the text (it uses a chunk of non-English words and letters)

[Sam]

Hi, welcome to the Community!

Awesome to hear you’re bringing your book in. Congrats on 46,000 words, that’s huge!

Bringing a .docx in is a quick job: you can use the “Import Project” feature on the Start Screen, under “Create New”. That’ll create a new Papyrus project and pull in your content, including the annotations.

Depending on the formatting, and how custom it is, it might look a little different in Papyrus. If you can share screenshots here, or send a document over to hello@papyrus.de, we’re happy to take a look and get more into details about the formatting.

For a quick tour of the formatting tools, check out the Start Screen’s “Learn” section.

For setting up headings, there’s “Outline Chapters, Scenes and Events”. For formatting your entire manuscript, there’s “Design Your Book’s Layout” introducing the Book Designer, Papyrus 12’s new layouting tool.

Have fun, and let me know how it goes!

[Syulang]

Hi Sam,
Thanks for the tips! I’ve got it imported and finding the Papyrus Base system for characters and stuff really useful - enjoying having an explore, I’m really impressed even as there’s a bit to get my head around. I started off with Papyrus on Atari, then accross to the early versions of Author on PC, but it’s still a big jump forward!

The formatting stuff I’ve got is things like this, with chapters not always set up properly to be on a new page in a sensible position, and some paragraph formatting is just out where I’ve made screw-ups in MS Word, line spacing and the like. Nothing individually major, but where there’s multiple instances scattered throughout a really big manuscript, it’ll be a pain to sort out manually, and in doing so I want to be sure I’m not just introducing new problems. Ideally, I’d like to be able to work on it with no formatting except special characters and things like marking verse or special words in italics, then running through the auto-magical formatter at the end before final check and printing.

[joey]

Hi, @Syulang ,

I like that snippet.

Hope I’m not overstepping, but how about adding a phonetic representation of the Greek letters so readers can know what they sound like? (‘Tha zisoume’ maybe)

[Syulang]

Not overstepping at all - I was going back and forth on that one

[Sam]

@Syulang

I’ve got it imported and finding the Papyrus Base system for characters and stuff really useful - enjoying having an explore, I’m really impressed even as there’s a bit to get my head around.

Awesome to hear!

Yeah, there’s a ton of features. I wouldn’t expect you to use all of them, so just root around in the “Learn” section a bit to see what you’re into right now. There’s a tool or two for everything, so it’s a good idea to find a few for now and go from there.

@Syulang

The formatting stuff I’ve got is things like this, with chapters not always set up properly to be on a new page in a sensible position –

Before doing the following, I can recommend taking a backup copy of your book, and trying these steps out on the copy, in case there’s some custom formatting you don’t want to lose.

Are the spaces made with Page Breaks or Line Breaks? If you set your headings to “Chapter” style in the Book Designer, you can decide exactly how much space do the headings take on page, and this will remove line breaks you’ve added:

If you leave the “Appearance” part empty, your chapter names will stay as-is. I think you didn’t have them numbered.

With page breaks, you’ll have to delete the empty pages manually. For this, I don’t think there’s an automated workflow.

@Syulang

– and some paragraph formatting is just out where I’ve made screw-ups in MS Word, line spacing and the like.

It looks like the running text doesn’t have a text style (see top-left of the bigger screenshot), and it looks like the paragraphs are left-aligned so they’re leaving space on the right side.

The alignment is a quick fix; you can switch it to justified from the toolbar:

If your book’s got only one type of running text, you could open the Book Designer, and set the “Text” part of your book to the font and line height you want. The Book Designer will apply a “Standard” text style to all your running text, so it’s uniform across the book with just a few clicks.

It’s not 100% these steps will get you there, but let me know if this is helpful, and we’ll go from there!

[marilynfoxworthy]

As far as deleting page breaks, there are times when you can do a Search and Replace on special characters and replace with nothing. That might help.

[Syulang]

Perfect - that’s really useful. Thanks, Sam!

[orko]

The problem lies largely in Word’s ‘Normal’ Style. Makes it a chore to migrate from doc/docx to pap when the document was originally created in Word. When it comes to formatting, Word is really bad influence. Makes us complacent in a lot of non-standard things and bad habits. Struggled with Papyrus Author myself 3 years ago when I made the switch.

What I find useful is having all my styles ready before migrating a document (you don’t need it if you’re sticking to Papyrus’s own predefined styles). I do the headings in Papyrus manually. Simply a matter of typing line by line and setting them to my header style. Then, migrating chapter by chapter (only text, excluding the headings, no extra lines - from the first letter of the chapter to the last full stop) even if the the file has over 50 chapters. And then I change the body of the individual chapters one by one to my desired style (including sub-chapters). Then I add scene/event marker. Finally, paragraph level changes wherever needed. Tedious work, but saves time and a lot of extra hassle. This workflow isn’t that good for any kind of non-fiction, but for novels its fine. Good side is, your comments etc., and bold italics etc. remains as is. Your non-English text will remain same too (unless you are using scripts for languages that are not supported and there’s logic issue that needs addressing).

Apart from the page-break line-break issue, one other thing to watch out for is extra space(s) at the end of paragraphs. When coming from Word’s ‘normal’ to Papyrus, in some instances that looks like an empty line in the text. Find those with space[CR] and replace with only [CR].

[Syulang]

Thanks for that, Orko - That’s a big help. Seriously wishing I had started this project in Papyrus rather than Word. Hindsight, unlike my real sight, is 20/20!