Scrivner to AO3 Workflow
I recently got very annoyed trying to get my work from Scrivner (Windows, 3), and did some research and experimenting. I believe I've found the most efficent way to do it, that retains italics, paragraph spacing, and line breaks (if they are entered originally as em-dashes. More on that later).
To begin, write! I lorem ipsum'd it so you don't have to suffer through my pretention.
I used a random amount of bolds, italics, etc. I have found that bolding does not consistently parse through, sorry. Neither does underlining.
Next got to File -> Compile
Compile for basic, multimarkdown -> Web Page (HTML), which is near the bottom.
Then either keep everything from your project, or uncheck what you don't want. I basically never compile an entire project at once, and only do sections at a time, so I can't speak for how well this method works for compiling an entire project in one fell swoop.
This will save your writing as an html document. Go find where you saved it, and double-click it. This will open it in your default internet browser. Mine is Firefox, so there might be small differences if you use Explorer or Opera.
Enjoy my bookmarks. So this is what the html document looks like. You can see that the em-dash linebreaks translated as actual pagebreaks. For the curious, the keyboard shortcut for an em-dash is alt+0151, using a numpad. Unfortunately, this does not work for the numberbar. You could probably ctrl+f and replace them if you want. An em-dash in dialogue or text will not be turned into a linebreak. As far as I'm aware, it must be a new paragraph, an em-dash, then another paragraph, to generate the linebreak.
You can also see that the underlined stuff got a little funky.
Right click on the webpage. Select Inspect, which will open the Page Inspector. Click on <body> ... </body>, which should highlight your writing.
Then, right click on <body> ... </body>, and select copy -> inner html
Paste this in the html section of your AO3 document, and you're done!
You can also right click on the webpage and select Source, which you can ctrl+a, ctrl+c, but I like being able to see the document as I'm selecting it.
Hopefully this is helpful to other people! It can also be used to directly format text for personal webpages, like a neocities or similar, if you want to host your own fics.
Cheers!
