Import

Import from Scrivener

Alhora reads a Scrivener project directly. You point it at the .scriv and it walks the binder — no compile step, no intermediate Word file, and no flattening of the structure you spent the draft building.

That is the main difference from the usual route, and it is worth understanding what it buys you.

How the binder becomes the book

A .scriv project is a folder containing a binder file — the outline — and one RTF document per item. Alhora reads the binder and walks the Draft folder's children in order:

Each text document
Becomes a chapter, titled from its binder title.
A folder with several documents
Contributes a Part from its own title, then its documents as chapters beneath it.
A folder with one document
Flattens to that document — a Part containing one chapter is almost never what the author meant.
Binder order
Preserved exactly. The order you see in Scrivener is the order the book is in.
Front and back matter
Detected from binder titles, so a document called “Dedication” or “Acknowledgements” lands in the right part of the book rather than as chapter one.
Documents outside the Draft folder
Ignored. Research, notes and the trash are not part of the manuscript.

A document whose content file is missing or corrupt becomes an empty chapter that keeps its title, rather than failing the whole import. You get a book with a gap you can see, not an error message and nothing.

Why this beats compiling to Word first

The usual advice for getting a Scrivener project into a formatting tool is to compile to Word or RTF and import that. It works. What it costs:

  • Your binder hierarchy is flattened into whatever the compile preset produced. Parts, in particular, often stop being parts.
  • You have to configure a compile preset correctly, which is its own skill and its own afternoon.
  • Every revision means recompiling and re-importing, and remembering the settings you used last time.
  • Front and back matter you kept as separate binder documents arrive as ordinary chapters.

Reading the project directly avoids all four. The structure you built in the binder is the structure of the book.

Preparing the project

  1. Tidy the binder. What you see is what you get, so anything you do not want in the book belongs outside the Draft folder.
  2. Make sure binder titles are the titles you want. They become the chapter titles.
  3. Empty the trash, or at least confirm nothing in it should be in the book.
  4. Use folders for parts and documents for chapters, rather than encoding hierarchy in the titles.
  5. Close Scrivener before importing, so any unsaved document content has been written to disk.

What does not come across

  • Compile presets and their formatting. Alhora does its own typesetting; a preset would be something to undo.
  • Synopses, notes, labels, status and keywords. Project management, not book content.
  • Snapshots. Alhora keeps its own version history on disk.
  • Collections and custom metadata.
  • Comments and annotations, for the same reason Word's do not come across.
  • Scrivener's placeholder tags. They are resolved by the compiler, and Alhora is not running it.

What does come across is the text, its structure and its character formatting — italics, bold, small caps — which is the whole of what a formatter needs.

After the import: what to do next

  1. Check the chapter list against your manuscript. This is the only step that matters — everything else is recoverable, and a missing chapter found at export is not.
  2. Set the trim size before anything else. It determines page count, which determines the gutter margin and the spine.
  3. Choose an interior style. This is where the book stops looking like a document.
  4. Fill in the metadata — title, author, ISBN, series — because the title page, copyright page and also-by page are generated from it.
  5. Run the print-readiness checks, then export EPUB and a print-ready PDF.

If you revise the manuscript in the original tool afterwards, re-import it rather than editing in two places. Alhora shows every change against your styled book and lets you accept or skip chapter by chapter, so the styling survives the update.

Questions, answered

Do I need to compile from Scrivener first?

Not for Alhora — it reads the .scriv project directly. Other formatting tools do require a compile to Word or RTF first, which is where the binder structure usually gets flattened.

Which Scrivener versions are supported?

The importer reads the standard .scriv bundle: a binder XML file plus one RTF per document. That is the format Scrivener 3 uses on both macOS and Windows.

What happens to my research folder?

It is ignored. Only the Draft — or Manuscript — folder is imported, which is the same rule Scrivener's own compile follows.

Do folders become parts?

A folder containing more than one document contributes a Part from its title, with its documents as chapters beneath. A folder containing a single document flattens to that document, because a part of one chapter is almost never what was meant.

Will my front matter be recognised?

Binder titles are matched against the usual names — dedication, acknowledgements, about the author and so on — and those documents are placed in the front or back matter rather than becoming chapter one. Check the result; the matching is by title, so an unusual name will not be recognised.

Can I keep writing in Scrivener afterwards?

Yes. Re-import when you have revised, and accept or skip the changes chapter by chapter. The formatting work you did in Alhora survives the update.

Open your .scriv and keep your structure

Point Alhora at the project. Folders become parts, documents become chapters, in binder order — and you can style and preview the whole book free.

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macOS, Windows, Linux and ChromeOS. No card needed to format and preview.