I have found alternative uses for Scrivener. One of these is litigation preparation, appellate brief writing, case management and of course job hunting. In these contexts, different Scrivener compile formats are required for a single project. One of these is that ancient analogue communication format, the paper letter. The document will be compiled to either pdf or Word–though there are already some delightful LaTeX letter document classes (I guess, compile to text and then format for one of them) but I am wondering if there isn’t a native way to go from a document in the binder directly to letter format. The issue is that a letter’s elements have fixed positions on the page and placing these elements in places on-screen in Scrivener doesn’t mean they will compile to where they are supposed to be on the paper page.
To complicate matters, there are country-specific requirements.
Yeah, I know, I could just select all, copy and paste into a blank Word document. I wonder if there isn’t a more Scrivener-focused solution.
This adds a signature, letterhead, and all metadata like address, cc, recipient etc. is specified within Scrivener directly. The template handles the positioning of all elements. It is trivial to use, you write your metadata and letter content and compile. More recently I switched to use a Pandoc>Typst template for this (letter-pro – Typst Universe), with the same workflow (however the metadata did change a bit). You can use different templates for different requirements. If you need to adjust what the template does, you edit it yourself. This also applies to CVs etc.
The fundamental idea is that you do not think of the Scrivener editor as a “formatter” at all, only a contents creator. The formatting is exclusively handled by the compiler pipeline (including the markdown tools) that rigs up the Scrivener content into the correct physical format. Once you get used to a markdown pipeline for Scrivener, almost anything is possible…