To be vague about it, since development is still ongoing, and I’m not KB: It won’t be a problem if you have several thousand notes in Simplenote. For one, Scrivener will definitely be biased toward project resource sharing, not interfacing with your entire network of notes. The goal was to make your manuscript available for plain-text editing on mobile devices, not become a equal partner in the Simplenote universe, like Notational Velocity. It really wouldn’t make sense to go that route for a number of technical and usability reasons.
So in that sense, a writing tool for the iPad and similar, not another Simplenote client.
I use TextMate for short stuff that isn’t meant to live long as a file (read: archived into a database within minutes or hours, and then forgotten about). What happens for me is: if I reach a point in TextMate where I find myself wanting to shuffle things around, or I start losing my place and spending a while looking for some spot I want to fix—it goes into Scrivener at that point. Since I write in Markdown, this is extremely painless since the result in a Binder structure matching the titling structure of the plain-text document. I’m back to writing in ten seconds. Thus, there is rarely anything prohibiting me from starting in TextMate, since the conversion to Scrivener is so seamless and rapid.
That’s similar to the way it works out for me. Blog posts go up hours after I start them, articles take a few days or weeks to write. OTOH, it took me 2-3 years to write my first novel, and I’m about eight months into my second and nowhere near done.
I write blogs and articles in HTML. Neither of the blogs I write for supports Markdown, alas.
Is there a markdown symbol for underlines, btw? I’ve never been able to find one. I’m told book editors prefer passages that would be italicized in books should be underlined in the MS, although this may be obsolete advice.
True, though one of the principle design purposes for Markdown in the first place was the generation of clean HTML code. From TextMate in particular, you can just hit a button and get an HTML file out of it which can then be plugged into the site or blog engine verbatim in most cases. I used to write directly in HTML as well, but haven’t for ages now. It’s just easier to type naturally and let MD handle all of the paragraph tags and so on. For documents, that is. If the project requires extensive magazine-style layout, of course a structural system like MD is not the right tool for the job. For articles, however, I think it’s great.
There is not a separate syntax for underlining, no. However with the MMD system there are two export engines that produce manuscript-ready results, converting all emphasis to underscoring. So for this specific workflow, the answer to your question is “yes”. If your question had been, “Can it do underlines and italics in the same document”, the answer would still be yes, but not without some coding to the engine code. Out of the box though, no.
The reason why MD itself doesn’t support underlining is that most web conventions discourage usage of underlining in not hypertext contexts. Since it was written for web authors and blog system plug-ins, there is virtually no need for underling. MMD came along later, specifically with the purpose of extending the web-centric MD tool into something more useful for authors of many mediums. So it has more capacity for this sort of stuff.
But, if you have further questions, I suggest we break this off to another thread as it is kind of drifting out of the iPad for Writers realm.
To keep it somewhat on topic: One point for M/MD with the iPad is that with the prevalence of plain-text workflows due to Apple’s limitations: it’s one of the few, easily accomplished, ways to author structured and (eventually) formatted texts on the iPad. You could write in HTML, but that would be a lot of keyboard mode switching.
I think Ioa has covered this, but basically Scrivener will just deal with adding any notes from a project you want synced to Simplenote, and it will keep track of them using the first line, by placing a keyword and ID there. And you can type the keyword on the first line of notes you want importing into that particular project. It’s a pretty simple two-step process, and using the keyword you can filter Simplenote only to view files for that project. I hope to put a small screencast together showing how it works over the next few days, as I know it will be a bit of an extra draw for 2.0.
Oh yes! I’ve read quite a few articles and then recognised your name at the top!
Okay, now you’re just being pedantic. Yes, “workflow” was admittedly a bad word. I meant “workflows”, I suppose - I just found it interesting that you both used TextMate for technology journalism and Scrivener for fiction, that’s all.
That’s fine, although now I wish I’d been on my best behaviour throughout…
Thanks. This is a gray area between public and private. On the one hand, if it’s addressable by URL then it’s theoretically public, but on the other hand, people might not expect it to be public.
It’s the privacy gray areas that get you in trouble, as Facebook is learning over and over again.
I personally have no problem with anything I’ve said in this thread being linked to. I think it would be good for authors to see that somewhere out there, a group of fellow writers are hashing out ways to use their iPads for writing, and hopefully join in.
In my opinion, a forum, like blog comments, are essentially public. Perhaps some do not think of it that way, but unlike Facebook, there was never any statement around here that this forum is anything other than an online discussion area for Scrivener and writing in general.
For typesetting manuscripts? I thought Textile only did XHTML? Also it’s important to note that the textfile markup, +that might look like an underline+ actually inserts an <ins>text here</ins> code. Some systems will show this as an underline, but there is no rigid standard for how a text insertion span is supposed to look. Some browsers don’t do anything with it at all. Semantically, it isn’t an underscore, it indicates text that has been added to a base text in revisions, and takes a datestamp as an attribute to show when it was inserted. It would be like using font sizes to indicate headers, instead of the header tags.
Ah, good to know. I haven’t looked into RedCloth too much. Since Scrivener just uses MMD out of the box, I’ve never messed too heavily with Textile, though I do like their method of indicating headers better than the hash-marks.
With both Markdown and Textile, it is possible to insert your own HTML into the document. It doesn’t look as pretty, but you could wrap things in the U element and it will come through just fine. MMD doesn’t, I don’t think, handle that in any of its XSLTs, but that would be an easy fix if you needed to go further than XHTML with it. But in a manuscript workflow it would be best to just use emphasis asterisks, and let the LaTeX conversion handle whether or not it appears as underscore in the final copy.
Excuse me, how did this thread get diverted into a MarkDown discussion?
Shouldn’t it possibly go elsewhere?
We are working hard at the e-mail / SimpleNote --> Scrivener connection.
So far, very good; compiled many notes and drafted two scenes of screenplay.
Also catching up on many back issues of WIRED, which we read on vacation.
Fascinating to see all the touted products that are now so 2009.
You can only test it if you’re part of the iPhone developer program though. Fortunately for me, I am, and PlainText is one of the nicest writing apps I’ve tried on the iPad so far. It’s a little like Simplenote but prettier. The source list is classily done, using a subtle grey and sliding in and out when you touch its divider or the edge of the screen. Perhaps the nicest touch is the margin padding, which means that you get an easy-to-read column of text even in landscape mode. The Times font was a good choice for the default, too. Along with Scrivener’s Simplenote sync, I’ve also been implementing a folder sync, where you can sync files with an external folder, and it works really, really well with PlainText.
So, I definitely recommend checking out PlainText when it hits the App Store.
I’ve some penpal friends (one of which a professional novel writer) who rave for the iPad. All the tests I did say that I would never be able to type more than a few words on it, and at a very low speed and with no pleasure at all.
So, I would like to ask the iPad owners: are you really enjoying the iPad for writing? So much, that you would switch from a portable Mac to an iPad for real work?
Thanks for the clarification. Maybe it’s a better practice to rewire some of Markdowns or Textiles internals to use the tag then?
