How to Move Out of Scrivener, With or Without Us

You May Not Need to Leave

Scrivener still does what made it famous. It’s a one-off purchase, it contains no AI, and its compile goes deeper than most of what has come since. If your trouble is one compile setting, an hour on the Literature & Latte forum may cost you less than a move.

People do leave for good reasons: they’ve moved to Linux, they want to work on a co-written book, they want plain files, or they’ve spent enough evenings with the compile window. Leaving also isn’t final, since your project stays a working Scrivener project for as long as you keep the app.

Back Up Before Anything Else

Choose File > Back Up > Back Up To… and pick a location outside your usual folders, with the ZIP option if it’s offered. If you’d rather copy by hand, the manual is clear on the point that a project is the entire folder ending in .scriv, with the .scrivx file being only part of it. Copy the lot.

Then read one chapter in the backup to prove it opens. Backups you haven’t opened are a statement of faith.

Leaving Without Shiro

Scrivener has four useful exits, and they keep different things. Menu names below come from Literature & Latte’s manual and blog, read in November 2026. The Mac and Windows versions can differ in small ways.

Compile to Word. Choose File > Compile, click the Compile for menu at the top and pick Microsoft Word (.docx), select the Default format and click Compile. You get the manuscript as one document, as Literature & Latte explains. That’s the right route if your next stop is Word, Google Docs or an editor’s inbox. It’s also the route that loses the binder: chapters become headings in a long file, and your notes stay behind.

Compile to Markdown. The same window, with Compile for set to MultiMarkdown and a format such as Basic MultiMarkdown. You get a single plain-text file that almost anything can read. Check your italics and footnotes on the other side, since the result depends on your compile format.

Export the binder. Select the top folder and choose File > Export > Files. Scrivener reproduces your binder’s structure as folders on disk, one file per item, as RTF, Word, plain text or MultiMarkdown (.md). The dialog can also save notes, metadata and snapshots, and can number the files so they stay in order. Files nested inside other files need a folder of their own, and text typed directly onto a folder lands in a separate file, so expect a little tidying. This is the most thorough exit, and a good archive whatever you do next.

Export the rest. File > Export > OPML File carries your outline to outlining apps, Outliner Contents as CSV gives you a spreadsheet of metadata, and Comments and Annotations collects those in one document.

For a thorough departure, do all of it: the binder as your archive, the compile as your working copy.

Moving to Shiro, Step by Step

Shiro’s desktop app reads Scrivener 3 projects. It downloads for free and doesn’t ask for an account to do this.

1. On the home screen, choose Import a book, then A folder, and pick your .scriv folder. Picking the .scrivx file inside it also works.
2. Read the preview, headed What the project will hold: chapters, scenes and word count.
3. Map your Scrivener statuses to Shiro’s, or keep them as they are. Labels come in unchanged.
4. If you have folders named things like Characters or Places, choose whether to turn their documents into World entries.
5. Import, read the report headed Not carried over, or carried over differently, and open the project.

Your Scrivener project isn’t changed at any point.

What Comes Across

In Scrivener	In Shiro
Binder order in the Draft or Manuscript folder	Chapters and scenes, in the same order
Text	Paragraphs, italic, bold, underline, strikethrough, links and footnotes
Synopsis	The scene’s synopsis, on its card
Document notes	A private note inside the scene, left out of word counts and exports
Labels, status, keywords	The same, with your statuses mapped as you chose
Custom metadata	The project’s own scene fields, typed; a field named POV becomes Shiro’s point of view
Include in compile	Kept, so excluded scenes stay excluded
Snapshots	Scene snapshots, with their dates and titles
Text on a folder	A first scene in that folder
Other binder documents	Notes
PDFs, images, other media	Copied into the project’s Research/ folder
Saved web pages	Sources, with their copy of the page
Template sheets	Shiro templates

Your book then lives as Markdown files in a folder, so you can read the result with any text editor, whatever you think of us.

What Doesn’t

• Fonts and colours. Deliberately. In Shiro, the look of a book belongs to the Publish lens. If colour carried meaning in your draft, such as blue for dialogue you doubted, that meaning is gone.
• Pictures inside the text. The report counts them. Images that sit in the binder as their own documents do come across, into Research/.
• Scrivener’s comments and inline annotations. Export them from Scrivener first with File > Export > Comments and Annotations, and treat that document as your copy. Check any that matter by hand.
• Compile formats. You pick a preset in Publish instead. If you’ve spent years on a compile format, that’s the real loss, and no import will spare you.
• The trash. Listed in the report, left out. Rescue anything you want before importing.
• Linked files and external sync folders.
• Collections, project targets and bookmarks. The importer doesn’t read these, so make a note of any you rely on.

What to Check Afterwards

Give it half an hour, before you write anything new in the imported copy.

1. Compare the counts. Put Scrivener’s word count beside Shiro’s. Small differences are normal, since the two count differently and Shiro leaves out notes. A difference of several thousand words is a question to answer.
2. Look at the outline. Check the first and last chapters, and any folder you nested oddly. A document that held other documents needs a look.
3. Read the report line by line, and go back for each picture it counted.
4. Open three scenes that you know have italics, footnotes and a link in them.
5. Check excluded scenes. Scenes you’d excluded from compile should still be excluded.
6. Open a snapshot on a scene you revised a lot, and see that the older words are there.
7. Export a test. Compile the whole thing to Word or PDF, and read a chapter as a reader would.

Keep the .scriv folder for at least the length of your next draft. It takes little room, and it’s the only copy that remembers the book the way you built it.

Where Shiro Won’t Replace It

We’d rather you knew now. Shiro has no screenwriting, where Scrivener has it. Scrivener has an iOS app, and Shiro has no phone app yet. Scrivener’s compile is deeper, and its body of tutorials took nearly twenty years to grow. The comparison page has the longer list, and the import page covers other sources.

The Questions People Ask

How do I export a whole Scrivener project to Word?

Choose File > Compile, set Compile for to Microsoft Word (.docx), keep the Default format and click Compile. That gives you the manuscript as one file. To keep each binder item as its own file, use File > Export > Files instead.

Can I export Scrivener to Markdown?

Yes. Compile with Compile for set to MultiMarkdown, or use File > Export > Files and choose MultiMarkdown (.md), which reproduces your binder’s folders on disk.

What does Shiro not bring over from Scrivener?

Fonts and colours, pictures inside the text, Scrivener’s comments and annotations, compile formats, the trash, and linked files or external sync folders. The import report names what applies to your project.

Can I go back to Scrivener afterwards?

Your original project is untouched, so yes, you can open it again. Anything you wrote since would have to come back by hand, for example by exporting from Shiro to Word and using Scrivener’s File > Import > Files.

Last revised November 2026.