Extracting Merge Data From Imported Manuscript Text File

[Randall Lee Reetz]

I'd like to import a plain text (.txt) file of the book writing software I am using (currently Scrivener, but could just as easily be Word or text edit) into Affinity Publisher and use the data merge function to look for and correctly isolate annotated text where I have indicated sequences of text that indicate things like quotations, author notes, images, illustrations, graphs, bibliographic entries, foot notes, citations, and associated formatting data like pinned location (character, line, paragraph, chapter, section, part chunk count). I'd like to use Affinity Publisher's merge function to cause the automatic build of pinned objects of appropriate kind and for these objects to be pinned as floated or inline objects automatically placed and sized and formatted as per user defined presets.

Anyone know how to go about doing so? Remember that the data that will be merged will be within the text that is floated into flowed text fields. The merged segments of in-line text will then be removed from the text presented.

All of this meta data has been carefully placed into the text during the writing process, is well formatted, regular, and should be identifiable by any merge algorithm that can detect and extract in-line delimiters.

Does Affinity Publisher's merge functionality allow for such a workflow? Could it be tweaked or hacked to do so? Scrivener offers some flexibility for its output the text and metadata. What are the delimiter requirements on the Affinity Publisher merge side of things?

 

Thanks, Randall

[Old Bruce]

18 hours ago, Randall Lee Reetz said:

indicate things like quotations, author notes, images, illustrations, graphs, bibliographic entries, foot notes, citations, and associated formatting data like pinned location (character, line, paragraph, chapter, section, part chunk count).

That is quite a list of things. I am going to say that your desire to include foot notes means no. Currently Publisher does not support footnotes. I would use the formatting of text and use the find replace (using regular expressions) to format the text. Pinned images.... I guess maybe you could use the Data Merge but this requires an *.xlsx file or a CSV or TSV file so then you have the problem of exporting into some thing like that from the Scrivener application. I have no experience of that application but I doubt it can do what you want.