Importing your work — how to bring any manuscript into WolfScribed

Why import instead of pasting

Copy-pasting a manuscript into a new tool is one of those tasks that feels simple and turns out to be an afternoon. Bold and italic survive if you're lucky. Structural hierarchy — chapters, scene breaks, heading levels — collapses into one undifferentiated block of text. And if your project lives in Scrivener or Plottr, you'd need to manually open and paste every document in order.

The import tool exists to close that gap. You upload a file, and WolfScribed reads the structure — document order, headings, bold, italic, chapter breaks — and creates the right number of documents in the right order. The goal is that you spend your time reading and revising, not moving text.

What happens when you import

Every import follows the same basic path:

Supported formats

Every format WolfScribed accepts, what it's typically used for, and what you get after import:

Format	Extension	Typical source	What you get
Word Document	.docx	Microsoft Word, Google Docs export	One document with bold, italic, and heading structure preserved
PDF	.pdf	Any application	One document, plain text only — formatting is not recoverable from PDF
Plain text	.txt	Any text editor	One document, paragraph breaks preserved
Rich Text Format	.rtf	Word, Scrivener compile, LibreOffice	One document with bold, italic, and paragraph breaks preserved
OpenDocument Text	.odt	LibreOffice Writer	One document with bold, italic, and heading levels preserved
Markdown	.md, .markdown	Obsidian, iA Writer, Ulysses, any text editor	One document with headings, bold, italic, lists, and code rendered
EPUB	.epub	Finished or self-published books, Calibre	One document per chapter, using the EPUB's own chapter titles
Fountain	.fountain	Fountain-compatible apps (Highland, Fade In)	One document with scene headings, characters, action, dialogue structured by type
Final Draft	.fdx	Final Draft	One document with scene headings, characters, dialogue, action — same as Fountain
Scrivener project	.zip (zipped .scriv)	Scrivener for Mac or Windows	One document per draft item, in binder order, skipping Research and Trash
Plottr project	.pltr	Plottr	One document per scene card, in timeline order, with chapter and character metadata
CSV / spreadsheet	.csv	Airtable, Notion, Excel, Numbers export	One document per row, with headers as field labels

Document formats

The simplest import path: one file becomes one document.

DOCX gives you the best formatting fidelity of any single-file format. Bold, italic, heading hierarchy (h2, h3), and paragraph breaks all survive. It's the best choice for a manuscript you compiled or exported from another tool specifically for import.

RTF is nearly as good as DOCX for prose. Bold, italic, and paragraphs are preserved. RTF is the default export format from many older writing tools, and it's the format Scrivener uses for its internal document files — which is why the Scrivener importer can read project content directly.

ODT (LibreOffice Writer's format) preserves bold, italic, and heading levels, extracted directly from the document's style definitions.

Markdown is rendered as formatted HTML — heading levels, bold, italic, lists, blockquotes, and code blocks are all converted. The raw Markdown text is also stored, which means the document stays editable as prose.

PDF is the least reliable format for import. PDFs encode visual layout, not semantic structure — text can be extracted, but columns, headers, footers, page numbers, and dropped caps often produce artifacts. Use PDF import as a last resort when no other format is available.

EPUB — importing a finished book

EPUB is a structured ebook format. WolfScribed reads the EPUB's spine — its chapter order — and creates one document per chapter, using chapter titles from the book's navigation file.

The most useful applications for EPUB import:

• Bringing a published or self-published work back into a draft environment to revise a new edition
• Importing a book you've written and exported from another tool as EPUB
• Splitting a single-file export back into chapters for scene-level work

Scrivener — importing your project

Scrivener stores projects as folder bundles (.scriv) rather than single files, so you can't upload one directly. Instead, zip your project first — and Scrivener has a built-in feature for exactly this.

What's imported: All documents and folders in the Draft folder, in binder order, including nested folders that have their own content. Scrivener 2 and Scrivener 3 project layouts are both supported.

What's skipped: The Research folder, Trash, and any document stub short enough to be empty. Your character notes, reference images, and research materials are not imported.

Plottr — importing your timeline

Plottr's native .pltr file is JSON — upload it directly without any export step. WolfScribed reads your scene cards and imports them in timeline order: left to right by chapter, top to bottom by plotline within each chapter.

Each imported document gets:

• The card's title (or an auto-generated title from chapter + plotline if the card has no title)
• The chapter and plotline name as metadata fields
• Any characters and places attached to the card, looked up by name
• The card's description — passed through as formatted text if Plottr stored it as HTML, or as a plain paragraph if not

This is most useful when you've planned your story in Plottr and are ready to start writing — or when you want to reference your beat-by-beat plan as WolfScribed documents while drafting.

CSV — importing planning data

Any spreadsheet exported as CSV can be imported as a set of documents. Each row becomes one document, with column headers turned into field labels.

Which column becomes the title is detected automatically. A column named "Title," "Name," "Scene," or "Heading" is used as the document title. "Chapter" is used as a fallback if no clearer title column exists. If none of those match, the first column is the title.

Long-form columns (descriptions, summaries, notes — where most values are longer than 80 characters) render as body paragraphs. Short columns (chapter numbers, POV characters, tags) render as labeled metadata: POV: Alex.

This works well for:

• Scene lists from Airtable, Notion, or a spreadsheet
• Character sheets with name, role, age, and description columns
• Beat sheets with chapter, beat, and summary columns
• Any planning data where each row represents a discrete item

Screenplay formats — Fountain and FDX

Fountain (.fountain) and Final Draft XML (.fdx) are both screenplay formats. WolfScribed imports them as structured documents:

Screenplay element	Becomes
Scene heading	Heading (h2)
Character name	Bold paragraph
Parenthetical	Italic paragraph
Dialogue	Plain paragraph
Action	Plain paragraph
Transition (CUT TO: etc.)	Bold paragraph
Section heading (# in Fountain)	Heading (h2/h3/h4)

The practical use case is adapting a screenplay into prose fiction — or keeping a screenplay version of a scene alongside a prose version for comparison. The import doesn't produce polished prose; it gives you the scaffold to write from.

After the import

Imported documents appear in your project's document library exactly like documents you wrote in WolfScribed. You can:

• Edit them with the full rich-text editor
• Add them to the scene planner with chapter, POV, and status metadata
• Attach them to canvas nodes in the story map
• Run AI analysis on them — summarise, find plot holes, suggest next scenes
• Export them back out as DOCX, PDF, or Markdown when you're done

The import is a beginning. Everything that happens next is the same as if you'd written the words there from the start.