How to Import Notes to Scrivener from Apple Notes, Obsidian, Notion, or Other Note-Taking Apps

When you’re writing a book or other project, you don’t only work when you’re sitting in front of your computer. Throughout the day, you may come up with ideas: you may think of things you want to add or change, you may discover new characters or plot points, and you may record these in a note-taking app. Or you may store research in a notes app, and want to bring it into Scrivener to add to your Research folder.

While you can record notes in Scrivener in several ways, you may prefer to use another app to store notes, and it’s not always easy to export them in a format that Scrivener can read. Getting these notes into your Scrivener project can be easy or may require several steps, depending on which app you use. In this article, we look at different note-taking apps and what you can do to get your notes into your Scrivener projects.

Note-taking apps and their formats

There are many note-taking apps, and they use different formats to display and store content. Some note-taking apps use only plain text, but most allow you to format text, whether by adding bold or italic, or going further with headings, lists, and tables and allowing you to add images.

One common way that many note-taking apps, such as Obsidian, Notion, and Bear, do this is by using Markdown, which is a simple way of formatting text using common characters. Files in Markdown can be converted to a variety of formats, including PDF, RTF, and HTML, making it a flexible way of writing rich-text notes. Markdown note-taking apps generally allow their notes to be exported as is, in plain text or .txt files, or in formats such as PDF or RTF.

Copy and paste

The easiest way to get the contents of a note app into Scrivener is to copy and paste it. However, depending on the app you use and the formatting you have applied to your note, the pasted text may or may not look the same in Scrivener.

If you copy a note written with Markdown formatting and paste it into Scrivener, you’ll see the note and its formatting characters, but the formatting will not be applied, because Scrivener does not interpret Markdown. In the screenshot below, you see a note with Markdown formatting in Obsidian on the left, and the text in Scrivener after copying and pasting it.

This may not be a problem for many or most of your notes; you may not use any formatting, or very little. If so, this is probably the best way to copy notes, though you have to do it manually for each one.

Exporting from note-taking apps

Most note-taking apps allow exporting in several formats. Here are some examples:

• Apple Notes lets you export notes in PDF or Markdown.
• Obsidian allows PDF exports, but there are plugins that allow you to export in a variety of formats. (Go to Settings > Community Plugins > Browse, and search for “export.”)
• Notion can export in PDF, HTML, or Markdown.
• Bear offers a number of options, including Markdown, RTF, PDF, and others.
• Evernote can export notes in its own ENEX format, which some note-taking apps can import, but it can also export notes in Markdown as .txt files.
• OneNote exports notes as PDF or .docx, and you can import .docx or Word files into Scrivener, or add PDFs to your Research folder.
• Google Docs lets you save files in a wide range of formats, including RTF, which is the easiest to add to your Scrivener project.

If you have done a lot of formatting in a note, and especially if you’ve included images, the best way to export it is probably as a PDF. This retains all the formatting and images, and you can drop it into the Research folder in your Scrivener project. If you want to be able to edit a note, the best option is RTF, which is what Scrivener uses within projects for text files. If this is not available, choose Word or .docx, if available, as Scrivener can convert these documents to RTF when you import them. And you can choose Markdown if your note-taking app doesn’t offer RTF or .docx, which you can then convert to add to your project.

Exporting a lot of notes and importing them into a Scrivener project

Some note-taking apps allow you to export multiple notes together, but many only allow you to export a single note at a time. And most of these apps store notes in a database, making them hard to access. Obsidian is an outlier; your notes are stored in a “vault,” which is just a folder containing Markdown files. If you right-click on a note in the Obsidian sidebar, you can choose Reveal in Finder (Mac) or Reveal in File Explorer (Windows) to see that file. You’ll be able to see all your note files, and you can copy these files to another location or drag them all into Scrivener. (If you do the latter, they will display any Markdown formatting in Scrivener, as in the first screenshot above, though see below for a way to convert them.)

There are a number of apps on the Microsoft Store and Apple’s App Store that can convert Markdown files, and some of them can batch-convert files. You probably won’t need to do this often, but you may have a lot of notes when you’re starting a project and want to bring them into Scrivener.

One way to convert a number of Markdown files in Scrivener is to create a folder in your project’s Draft or Manuscript folder, then drag all your Markdown files into that folder. Or, you can create a new project, and drag all your Markdown files into the top-level folder.

Choose File > Compile, make sure that the folder containing the Markdown files is checked in the right-hand pane, and choose Multi-Markdown > Web Page (.html) from the top menu. Click Compile, save the web page, then drag it to your Research folder.

You can then select the web page and choose Documents > Convert > Web Page to Text so you can edit the text. This process combines all your notes into a single document, but after you’ve converted it to text, you can edit it, copy and paste from it, cut parts of it, and so on.

For advanced users, Pandoc is a command-line tool that can convert files to and from many formats. You can use this within Scrivener, importing a bunch of Markdown files, compiling them to RTF files with Pandoc, then adding the resulting files to your project. This Literature & Latte forum thread discusses this, and chapter 21 of the Scrivener manual goes into great detail about working with Markdown and Pandoc.