Importing your work

What you can bring in #

Word (.docx), Scrivener (a .scriv folder or a zip of one), Fountain screenplays (.fountain, .spmd or .txt), and a Charc Backup (.charc), which restores a whole project rather than importing text into a new one.

Importing is offered on the New Project screen beside starting blank, so it is a first step rather than something to find later.

How your file is split into scenes #

A manuscript is one long file; Charc has to decide where chapters and scenes begin. It guesses, shows you the result, and lets you change the rule.

Chapters can be found by heading styles, by lines that read like “Chapter 7”, by page breaks, or not split at all. Scenes can be split on separators like * * *, on blank lines, or left whole.

Auto-detect tries to work out which of those your document uses. If it guesses wrong, change the rule and the preview updates — nothing is imported until you accept it.

What survives the trip #

Bold, italic and underline, paragraph structure, and chapter and scene titles where they can be identified. From Scrivener, the binder structure, synopses and notes come across as outline nodes and entity pages.

Tracked changes in a Word file are resolved as you would expect: insertions are kept, deletions are dropped. Comments and revision marks are not imported.

After the import #

You land in a real project: an outline you can reorder, scenes you can write in, and a format you can change. Nothing about the import is permanent — if the split was wrong in one place, move the scenes rather than importing again.

Set the book's design afterwards in Project settings. Imported formatting is your draft's, not the finished book's.