Import
Import turns an existing draft into a structured book — chapters and scenes detected, shown to you for review, then created. If you arrive with a 50,000-word manuscript, you should be writing in structure within minutes, not splitting it by hand.
Supported sources
| Source | Description |
|---|---|
| DOCX | Microsoft Word document |
| TXT | Plain text file |
Markdown (.md) |
Text in Markdown format |
Scrivener (.scriv) |
A Scrivener project |
How to import
You can start an import in two places:
- From the welcome screen — choose "Start from an existing manuscript."
- Inside an open project — run the import command from the command palette or the File menu.
Then:
- Pick the file to import.
- Review the preview — the detected title, chapters with scene counts, total words, and any warnings from reading the file.
- Choose where it lands — a new project, or an existing one. (Inside a project, the current project is preselected; you can change it.)
- Click Import.
- Review the results — created acts, chapters, scenes, and total words, plus anything skipped, grouped by act, chapter, or scene, with reasons. Click Open Book to land on the first scene, or Close to leave it for later.
Structure detection
Writer Studio reads your headings to find structure, and it understands Russian:
- Headings like «Глава…» and «Часть…», roman numerals, and Markdown or Word headings become chapters. The opt-in "Map top-level parts to acts" toggle (see below) — offered for Scrivener, Markdown, and Word — turns a detected top-level part into a separate act; without it, and always for TXT, a detected part heading survives only as a chapter title.
- With the toggle off, which is the default, every chapter-level heading in a Markdown or Word file becomes a chapter — in Markdown that means Heading 1 and Heading 2 (a level-3 heading starts a scene instead), and in Word it means Heading 1 and every deeper level. The heading's text becomes that chapter's title, not a separate part. A file that uses a single heading level maps that level to chapters.
- Within a chapter, a
***,* * *, or---line, a page break, or (in Markdown files) a level-3 heading (###) starts a new scene. - If no structure is found, the whole manuscript becomes one scene. The preview says so plainly.
Mapping parts to acts
By default, Writer Studio flattens the top level — Scrivener Part folders, or Heading 1 sections in a Markdown or Word file — into ordinary chapters; that top level survives only as a chapter title, not a container of its own. If you'd rather keep that top level, turn on Map top-level parts to acts in the preview: it's off unless you ask for it, and the preview shows the resulting act hierarchy before anything is created.
What counts as a "top-level part" depends on the source:
- Scrivener — each top-level Part becomes an act, and the folders inside it become chapters under that act. A Part with loose text sitting directly inside it gets that text as the act's first chapter, titled after the Part. A top-level folder that holds only text documents stays a regular chapter and never becomes an act. Empty Parts are skipped, and Part folders nested deeper than the top level still flatten into chapters.
- Markdown and Word — a Heading 1 section becomes an act when chapter headings nest under it, and those nested sections become its chapters. In Markdown the nested level is Heading 2; a Word file may nest any deeper level. Text sitting directly under the Heading 1, before its first nested chapter heading, becomes the act's first chapter, titled after the part. A Heading 1 with nothing nested under it stays a plain chapter — you never get an empty act.
TXT has no heading depth to group by, so it never offers this toggle.
Preview before anything is created
Nothing is created until you confirm. The preview shows the editable book title, the chapters and their scene counts, the total word count, and any warnings from reading the file. The full report of anything skipped — grouped by act, chapter, or scene, with reasons — appears on the results screen after the import completes. You commit only to a structure you have seen.
Encoding
Text files are read as UTF-8. A legacy Russian file (windows-1251 / CP1251) is detected and converted automatically — your Cyrillic comes in correctly, never as garbled characters. An encoding Writer Studio cannot read is rejected with a clear message instead of importing nonsense.
What import promises
- The source file is untouched. Import reads it; it never changes the original on your disk.
- Ordinary, editable structure. Every imported chapter and scene can be renamed, moved, or deleted just like structure you made by hand.
- Nothing half-done. Cancel at any point, or quit the app mid-import, and no partial book is left behind.
- No phantom word count. Imported words do not count toward your daily goal or streak — they are existing work, not today's writing. See Writing goals.
- A one-time door. Import does not stay linked to the source file; after the door closes, your project is the source of truth.