I’m working on a book. So far I used a simple text editor+asciidoc which then gets processed with pandoc to produce what I want as a result.
I’m trying to migrate to Scrivener, but being completely new I’m totally stuck.
I want my book to have a Part->Chapter->Section structure
To also have bibtex blibliography, and footnotes
A TOC and special stuff like a Preface, a Foreword and Callouts
I can do all that with my current asciidoc setup (using a simple text editor), but none of the compile formats seem to work.
I really need to compile to some sort of intermediate thing like asciidoc, or mmd, or latex, so that I can process that with pandoc so that in turn I can later produce a number of actual outputs in a unified manner.
I guess I just haven’t figured our how to use this program.
Post moved to our Markdown and LaTeX forum, which is a more appropriate venue.
If you haven’t already, I’d recommend taking a look at our Interactive Tutorial, available from the Help menu. It’s a good overview of Scrivener’s fundamental operations.
If you already have a nearly complete manuscript, though, what do you hope Scrivener will do for you? Its focus is on manuscript development, not page layout.
I did watch the tutorial and also read the manual, but I get lost on the Compilation details.
I don’t have a complete manuscript at all, but I’m kind of impatient and wanted to make sure I won’t end up with dead end. I only have like 3 chapters, plus the provisional parts and sections structure and names.
I tried to export to mmd as the most basic stuff and I’m getting something that is starting to look right, but for example, it took me a while to figure out that I needed to check something like “transform rich text to markdown” or such,
I did, but I get lost in conversations that seem to be for someone with a deeper understanding of the compile workflow.
I also tried to steal the “manual” project which has a perfect structure but it doesn’t compile at all.
It gives me an error about a ruby script that isn’t there. And if I uncheck the script, it doesn’t do anything anyway if I just hit compile without any additional setup.
As you already have some familiarity with asciidoc/pandoc, then I would definitely recommend workflows where the output is MMD (which does support Pandoc).
Fundamentally, you want to use Styles and Section Types which the compiler will be able to transform to markdown. This can then be used by Pandoc for any final outputs. My usual workflow uses Pandoc and a management tool called pandocomatic: Scrivomatic: Scrivener & Pandoc{omatic} # | scrivomatic — but it does require some setup. But even if you don’t install any tools to compile yourself, you can still look at the document and compiler settings to get the idea of how to hook up styles and section types to flexibly structure your markdown. The resultant PDF for that workflow: scrivomatic/workflow.pdf at master · iandol/scrivomatic · GitHub – template: Scrivomatic
I looked at scrivomatic and pandocomatic, but I couldn’t make it work. I think it is because I’m on Windows, not Mac.
But I didn’t try hard enough…
I didn’t know about Quarto… that looks very promising.
So great! I now have a path to follow
Thank you!
PS: I actually have an unrelated but important question which you might have the answer for: I’ve tried using Grammarly and ProWrittingAid but they won’t “learn” about my ignored suggestions, so they keep popping up, which is a huge pain in the butt.
Is there something like that which actually works for Scrivener??
Ah yes, on Windows paths and their delimeters are all different and so many workflows from the *nix world fail. The super cool WSL2 on Windows should make this incompatibility a thing of the past, but it still requires some setup and knowledge to benefit from it…
I did some initial testing for getting scrivomatic working on Windows, but as I have no need for it, and my Windows 11 install is endlessly frustrating (a clean install on a powerful workstation, but slow as molasses compared to Ubuntu on the same machine, and lots of random bugs like losing my start menu structure every reboot), I didn’t pursue it… BUT the general techniques used in these workflows are still relevant even if you can get the tools installed based on the macOS instructions.
I think quarto handles some of the cross-platform incompatibilities so would also be a good solution from that perspective.
I don’t use either grammerly or prowritingaid so can’t provide any cogent feedback how to get them behaving!
