An introduction

General
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Hello!

I am starting (back) with Scrivener based on one primary need. I have worked exclusively with LaTeX for well over 4+ decades. The greatest challenge for me is no longer in finding a package or command to generate an output format that I demand in my final output document (primarily PDF). The greatest challenge for me is administering the myriad of resources and sub-documents that I will use to go into a final document (more below).

I played with Scrivener a long time ago. It did not really click. My first read on the General Non-Fiction Template for LaTeX … clicked.

This template caters to those that by and large prefer to compose directly in LaTeX itself, and will be approaching Scrivener primarily as an organisational and composition tool for constructing a longer .tex file from the smaller snippets written into the Draft folder.

Yes, exactly! I need help to organize the stuff that goes into the LaTeX document. I’ve got the LaTeX part mastered already. The second paragraph that clicked is this one …

With traditional word processors, you would need to go through and reformat your entire manuscript for every format you wanted to create—changing the font and paragraph settings and so on. In Scrivener, there’s no need for any of that. You write using whatever font and format you like looking at on the screen, and then you tell Compile to change the formatting in the final document.

Here again, among the many limitations that frustrate me with Word versus LaTeX, one is the WYSI(what you are stuck with) approach. Yet the limitation that frustrates me with LaTeX versus Word is that you cannot always see glaring format or layout issues quickly enough to avoid them. The potential to have the best of both worlds is enticing.

I have three different projects in mind as test cases. All are textbook length documents; I will (for the moment) stay exclusively within LaTeX for shorter documents such as journal articles. One project is a textbook in a specific college graduate science/engineering field. Another is a general resource book for science engineering students (a “Learning Toolbox” book). The third, further out project is a general template for a thesis/dissertation (to supplement existing Word and LaTeX templates from my institution).

I’ve got macOS resource tools that, as I understand, work well with Scrivener: Bookends and DevonThink. I am curious to see how to work with content from other tools – Curio, GeoGebra, python, Igor Pro, … – in a synergistic way.

I may be mostly quiet here as I play around to learn how to do the basics for what I want. I’ve only chimed in once already for suggestions and questions about outputs when using LaTeX for compiling. This is mostly from my LaTeX experience side.

I look forward to seeing where this adventure goes!

Thanks for the moment to have the floor.

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JJW

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Welcome!

There are advantages to using shorter works when experimenting with Scrivener. While the Scrivener + LaTeX combination is extremely powerful, there is definitely a bit of a learning curve. It’s much less frustrating to climb it when you’re dealing a few thousand words, rather than tens of thousands.

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My intent is to finalize the process work with just one chapter. When that works as I want, everything else should be just a matter of adding beads to a chain (chapters to a book).

–
JJW

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