Importing and exporting

Sgeulai is not trying to be the last place your book ever lives. Everything comes in and everything goes out.

Bringing work in

Command	What it does
Import Scrivener Project…	Brings the binder structure across along with the text.
Import EPUB Manuscript…	Splits a finished EPUB back into chapters.
Import Plottr File…	Reconstructs the manuscript along with the plot lines you had planned.
Import Bibliography (BibTeX / CSL-JSON)…	Fills the Source records for research-heavy work.
Import Manuscript (from Another Project)…	Merges one manuscript from another Sgeulai project's export into this one — see below.
Import Highlights (Apple Books)…	Reads a backup exported by the Highlights app — see Research Highlights.
Import Project Backup…	Restores a whole project from a backup file. In the File menu.

You can also import facts into a single record from Wikipedia, from the record's own sheet — useful for historical figures and real places.

Sending work out

The Export button in the editor toolbar (the arrow-out-of-a-box icon) holds ten commands, each writing straight to a save panel using whatever is already configured in Settings — no intermediate dialog to fill in first.

Command	For
Preview Manuscript…	A live look at the typeset book before committing to a file — see below.
Export ePub (Styled)	A readable EPUB. The only EPUB export there is; there is no plain/unstyled variant.
Export Manuscript (PDF)	Standard manuscript format — Letter trim, one-inch margins, deliberately unbranded — for submission.
Export for Vellum (DOCX)	Styled for Vellum's own importer to recognise, with no table of contents field — Vellum builds its own front matter from the heading structure.
Export to Scrivener…	A manuscript nested by Part, going back out as a `.scriv` package — see below.
Export Manuscript (DOCX)	The same Word file, but with a real, clickable table of contents — for an editor who wants to navigate a Word document directly.
Export Manuscript (RTF)	The manuscript-format PDF's page setup (trim, margins, page numbers) in an RTF file instead.
Export Project Backup (JSON)	Everything, in a format you can read without this app.
Export Manuscript for Another Project…	One manuscript, on its own, to merge into a different Sgeulai project — see below.
Export AI Provenance Report…	A PDF breakdown of how much of the manuscript carries an AI mark and of what kind — see Writing aids in the editor.

Two DOCX exports, one file format, different jobs. Vellum and plain-DOCX both produce a .docx, but they are built to be read by different things next: Vellum's own import step, or a person scrolling and clicking a table of contents in Word. Pick the one for whoever opens it next rather than by file extension.

Preview Manuscript…

Opens a sheet with its own Styled/Manuscript-format toggle and its own Export menu — four outputs local to the preview, separate from the toolbar's: Export PDF (Styled)…, Export PDF (Manuscript Format)…, Export DOCX… and Export EPUB…. Reach for this when you want to see the page breaks and typography before deciding what to send.

Exporting to Scrivener

Export to Scrivener… is the same round trip in the other direction from Import Scrivener Project…: a manuscript nested by Part, going back out as a .scriv package.

Moving a manuscript into another project

Export Manuscript for Another Project… and Import Manuscript (from Another Project)… are a pair, and neither is the same thing as a project backup. Export writes just one manuscript — plus the Story Bible records that belong to it — to its own file; Import merges that file additively into whichever project is currently open, alongside whatever is already there. Nothing existing gets touched, and any reference the manuscript had to something outside its own scope (an entity that was never assigned to that manuscript) is dropped on import rather than pulled in — the import result tells you how many links were dropped, so nothing goes missing silently.

This is deliberately different from Import Project Backup…, which replaces every record in the currently open project with what's in the backup file. Use the manuscript export/import pair to move one book between projects; use a project backup to restore or clone a project wholesale.

Backups

A full project backup is written automatically before anything destructive — clearing a manuscript, replacing an AI analysis. Find them under Tools ▸ Show Automatic Backups.

The JSON backup is the one to keep if you keep only one. It is the whole project — manuscripts, bible, relationships, positions — in a plain text format that does not need Sgeulai to be readable.

What is not touched

Importing a manuscript does not take ownership of the file it came from. Deleting a manuscript inside Sgeulai leaves the original .md on disk exactly as it was.