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 — an editable title suggested from the file name, 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.
- You land directly in the book's first scene — no confirmation screen. If anything was skipped while creating chapters or scenes, a report opens automatically, grouped by part, chapter, or scene, with reasons.
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 Preserve top-level Parts toggle (see below) — offered for Scrivener, Markdown, and Word — turns a detected top-level part into a separate Part; without it, and always for TXT, a detected part heading survives only as a chapter title.
- With the toggle off, 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. A mark only starts a scene when it stands alone on the line, so a dash opening a line of dialogue stays part of the prose. A blank scene break has nothing to recognize, so scenes divided that way come back merged. - A file you exported from Writer Studio comes back without the title page it printed: the title and author are already the book's own, so importing them again would only add a chapter you would have to delete. If you wrote something in place of that copyright line, it imports as a leading chapter like any other text before the first heading.
- If no structure is found, the whole manuscript becomes one scene. The preview says so plainly.
Preserving top-level parts
Preserve top-level Parts starts on when your file looks like it has that layer — more than one top-level heading (or binder folder), with deeper headings nested under at least one of them. A single top-level heading over the whole file is read as the book's title rather than a Part, so the toggle starts off there, as it does for a file with one heading level.
With it off, the top level — Scrivener Part folders, or Heading 1 sections in a Markdown or Word file — flattens into ordinary chapters, surviving as a chapter title rather than a container of its own. You can change the toggle before confirming either way, and the preview shows the resulting hierarchy before anything is created.
What counts as a "top-level part" depends on the source:
- Scrivener — each top-level Part stays a Part, and the folders inside it become chapters under that Part. A Part with loose text sitting directly inside it gets that text as the Part's first chapter, titled after the Part. A top-level folder that holds only text documents stays a regular chapter and never becomes a Part. 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 a Part 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 Part's first chapter, titled after the part. A Heading 1 with nothing nested under it stays a plain chapter — you never get an empty Part.
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 title suggested from the file name, the chapters and their scene counts, the total word count, and any warnings from reading the file. If anything is skipped while creating the book, a report opens automatically after import, grouped by part, chapter, or scene, with reasons. 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.