I can SO relate to using Scrivener tags and labels as you describe – and taking HOW many years for me to figure that out?!?
(Keith is an interface design genius to pack so much into Scrivener while keeping it so easy to use.)
Useful information on NWP’s format search capability – thanks!
Hi nontroppo, I switched from FrameMaker, not PageMaker. For all the advantages of using tagging such as Multimarkdown, tagging is too much of a slowdown for my workflow for me to use it. So I would need a conversion front end that let me work in what-you-see-is-kinda-sorta-what-you-get like Scrivener does, and tag under the hood. (An interface similar to WordPress would actually work pretty well, IMO.) Got any suggestions?
NWP looks like it might be good for final document output. I’m definitely not going to use it to MANAGE my million-word 10-volume set, since it chokes on big documents. (Heck, even Scrivener struggles some! I haven’t figured out why, given that I have another project containing 2.1 million words that only slows down if I do an operation involving skazillions of Scrivenings.)
Hi ptram, thanks for suggesting InDesign. The crashing issue seems problematic, however.
I remain boggled that FrameMaker, my old power tool from way back in the old OS 9 days, remains in significant ways more powerful, faster, and better able to handle giant projects and long documents than today’s “powerful” software. (Of course OS X still won’t run Window Monkey, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.) Thumbs up to the old FrameMaker programmers for creating such an amazing program!
Joy, I’ve been looking into what I was telling you, making a sort of example workflow, and in doing so clarified an important key to bulk search and format using the font icon in the status bar at the bottom of the window. It’s a no brainier really: italics and bold are ignored as attributes when you select all, because you may have italicised or bolded individual words or phrases within paragraphs. So to distinguish headings or paragraphs requiring a particular style, you should use font, size or colour.
You should also leave selecting colour marked paragraphs in the same font and size as body text to the end.
Sorry, Mark – I’m just catching up with the forum and have only just seen your post; as the conversation has moved on (and you have solved the problem), my comments are moot! I’m afraid I’m still on Crossover 14, not having had the time or courage to update my installation yet. But I had exactly the problem that you encountered in Crossover 15 in a previous version of Crossover, and as far as I can remember, I got round it by storing the projects inside the Crossover file structure rather than in their normal position on my disk. The issue miraculously cleared up in Crossover 14, which makes me reluctant to modernise!
Actually, Astrid, as I wrote later on in this thread, removing Scriv 1.8.6 completely and reinstalling CrossOver 1.5 and Scrivener 1.9 solved the problem. All seems to be well except occasionally there seems to be a long delay when switching between editor splits. I’ll let you know if I experience it again, but I won’t be using it much.
I can’t put the projects in the CrossOver file system, as they are the ones I share with Shirley (in China), so they need to be in our shared Cubby. There was a moment when the coding issue seemed to be raising its head — since we’d last worked together she had had to have a new HD in her laptop so a new install of Windows 7, and I’d gone through Yosemite and El Cap updates. She couldn’t update to 1.9 as the download failed on several attempts. I put the 1.9 .exe in our shared Cubby, she ran it from that and all went well, and it solved the coding problem.
Some while back I said that I was putting together a sort of example workflow Scriv --> NWP. It’s taken time, but basically I’ve done it—though no doubt there are errors and omissions—so for good or ill, here you are Joy, and anyone else who’s interested. I attach—I hope—the .scriv project and the final RTF produced by Nisus following my approach. They are both zipped for upload to the forum.
Asciidoctor (and Markdown for that matter) doesn’t use tags but a rather a lightweight markup that’s very easy to learn. Don’t waste your time trying to do complex technical writing with a word processor; by complex I don’t mean subject but rather the workflow. If you need conditional output, variables and structural elements like admonitions, indexes and so on you’re much better off using AsciiDoc, Docbook or Dita. Doubly so if you want to work in version controlled environments like Git as part of a development or documentation team.
Scrivener is outstanding at what it does: writing prose (fiction or non-fiction) when you’re a single author but it falls apart rapidly when you try to use it collaboratively or to manage a documentation suite where you have to conditionally produce output formats based on variables.
Thank you very much indeed for these, Mr X! As someone, who, thanks to MS-Word-weariness-and-disillusionment, has recently purchased NWP, I expect to well-thumb your guide (metaphorically speaking) in the coming days. And your recipes!
Thanks Hugh; I hope I haven’t made too many mistakes.
By the way, especially as you’re new to NWP, if you need any help with anything in this, don’t hesitate to get in touch, either here or on the Nisus forums—I’m ‘xiamenese’ there too.
To me, although NWP is a very powerful word-processor with many really great and advanced features, it is very intuitive. However, it’s a bit like Scrivener; because I’ve been using it from the very beginning, I have developed my usage gradually as it has developed. There are people who now come to it new and find it a bit daunting. Mind you, I’m not a “macro man” so haven’t really learnt the very powerful, built in macro language, but in the NWP macros forum there are extremely helpful people who contribute regularly, as does Martin from Nisus themselves.
So, enjoy using NWP, and don’t hesitate to get in touch here, or by PM, if I can be of any help.
My thanks also Mr X, as I took advantage of Winterfest to buy NWP and am looking forward to banishing MS Word from my work flow as far as possible. Will be consulting your guides in the weeks to come.
Maybe this is the answer that gets the buzzer if this was QI but he goes, why not Adobe InDesign? All that you request and much, much more. Subscription pricing so you can use it and leave after one or two months, or if its a years work get cheaper monthly pricing.
I don’t know if Indesign has changed much since I last used it (CS5.5) but it is hideously unsuited to developing complex, structured documents. Besides it’s proprietary - both the program and the file format - and only runs on OS X and Windows.
Given that the OP want’s to move away from a legacy, proprietary, and expensive format suggesting that they buy their way into another pay-walled garden is probably not something they desire.
