First, I had a hard time figuring out the best spot for this post (and I hope a post like this is even allowed). Since it’s partly a request is for technical support I went with that.
I’m looking for a consultant to help get me up to speed with Scrivener, Latex, and MultiMarkdown… not so much specifics about the technical nuts and bolts, but more of the high-level technical insight – what to learn and why. Looking for this kind of high-level technical & process insight from someone with solid publishing experience.
Here’s my situation:
I have a non-fiction book that’s been fully outlined. Now moving into the writing phase. The book will have a lot of illustrations, captions, numbered “Big Ideas”, tables, and a lot of cross-referencing – forward and backward.
I’m looking for someone who’s been through the process for this kind of book, someone who knows what methodology serves a publisher, how to knock out both Kindle and printed formats at the same time (or as close as possible), the issues I need to account for, etc., etc.
Looking to make my way quickly through the learning & training phase, thus I’m willing to pay for consultation from someone who really knows the process.
If you’re available, please PM me, or post a reply and I’ll follow-up.
FYI… I also have inquiries out to a few book-writing experts, but I’ve had a lot of luck so far from the Scrivener community.
As far as Scrivener goes, the best suggestion I can make is to do the tutorial that comes as part of the app. It’s reasonably high-level, and there is no substitute for its ‘hands on’ approach to learning.
You would want - I imagine - to pay particular attention to the Compile section?
That would be your starting point, then come back with any further questions you may have.
I’m already pretty familiar with Scrivener. Been using it a while.
What I’m looking for is someone with experience working with the publishing industry who can help me get up to speed on incorporating Latex and Markdown (if those are still the recommended tools) for non-fiction works that involve a lot of cross-referencing.
Can I also recommend thinking about PrinceXML instead of LaTeX? Prince uses HTML and advanced CSS for layout, and so the workflow of Scrivener MMD > Pandoc > HTML[ePub|mobi|PDF] would I suspect be more flexible. Having said that Pandoc offers a lot of control for LaTeX, but I think CSS is a far more logical and transferable technology for layout[1] than the arcane world of LaTeX. Prince is a commercial product, so that is a factor against it. One non-fiction technical writer on the forum here (though I forget his name ), uses Prince with Scrivener and he’d be ideal for this.
Great info here. I hadn’t heard about Prince before. I checked their web site and saw that they are developing a special version of their software for the book publishing industry. They’re building it based on special requests direct from the publishers. Seems to suggest a reasonably high adoption rate.
And thanks for taking the time to find the user you had in mind. Super-nice of you to do that.
Prince has been around for a long time, and Håkon Wium Lie the Director of the company is the original inventor of CSS at CERN in 1994, so this is a serious company. The samples clearly show how powerful and flexible Prince is for complex layouts. And the whole system is only a few MBs in size, amazing!
Regarding the Markdown workflow, there are several wrappers of Pandoc that allow you to automate some quite complex patterns. So you can run preprocessors, postprocessors and specific pandoc-filter sets all from the Scrivener metadata. Examples include Panzer or Pandocomatic:
), uses Prince with Scrivener and he’d be ideal for this.
