LaTeX without MMD

Scrivener
1

I’ve read a lot about using MMD to produce LaTeX output, but is a LaTeX+Scrivener -> PDF workflow possible?

2

In theory, yes.

  • Compose document in Scrivener, using LaTeX markup as required.

  • Compile to plain text.

  • Run the resulting file through LaTeX as normal.

  • Pipe the LaTeX output to the PDF creator of your choice.

I haven’t actually done this, but once you get the file into a format that LaTeX can read you have the full power of LaTeX at your disposal. MMD exists in part because for most people creating the LaTeX file is the hard part.

Katherine

3

Katherine,

Thanks for the quick reply. I’m glad that this is possible, and I will try this soon.

Best,
Jason

4

Yes, very feasible. As Katherine points out, it’s possible to use the interface as a plain-text editor, and once you get that, you can make all sorts of structured documents; HTML, whatever. Scrivener has some tricks under the hood which can make writing syntax oriented documents easier. I’ve posted on this in the past, here is a trick for depth-aware sectioning:

https://forum.literatureandlatte.com/t/semantics-markup-latex-without-mmd-and-scrivener/10142/2

Note the described label trick won’t work on Windows yet, but the prefix/suffix advice works fine.

In general I think Scrivener makes a nice document platform for LaTeX, not so much because it handles LaTeX at all, but for all of the reasons it makes a great long-document platform for other workflows. You can keep all of the clutter out of the way in the binder by putting the preamble and such in its own documents. It’s main drawback is that it of course has no awareness of LaTeX (or any mark-up language for that matter) in the main editor. So no completion or syntax highlighting. Fortunately for the bulk of the document it is just normal paragraphs anyway. The tricky stuff can be copied out for editing in TeXWorks or something and pasted back in when done.

5

Ioa,

Thanks for your comment. I’ve been hopeful that Scrivener could be used as a tool for long-form document composition and organization, followed by fine tuning (e.g., for LaTeX) in another environment. As a mathematician, I’m very comfortable in LaTeX and not ready to make the MMD->LaTeX transition yet.

Jason