Howdy. Hope this is the right forum. If not, can you cut-and-paste me where I need to go?
I’m gearing up for my dissertation, and have moved away from using EndNote. Now I use Bookends for my bibliographic work. I also am moving away from Word. I’m currently using Pages, but may use Mellel for my dissertation. Here are my questions: How does scrivener fit with Bookends (if at all), and how does it fit with Pages or Mellel? Do they play nice together?
Thanks!
GMB
In my experience, Bookends, Scrivener and Nisus Writer Pro work together brilliantly, and it seems that Bookends-Scrivener-Mellel may be even better for dissertations, though I don’t know why as Mellel doesn’t work well for me (Chinese). There are others on the forum who use Mellel, who will no doubt comment.
Pages, on the other hand, I’m not so sure about for your purposes as its RTF import is ropy, e.g. not accepting footnotes. That, by the way, is significant, as Scrivener’s .DOC export is actually re-branded RTF — which is perfectly legitimate — rather than .DOC binary format.
Mark
Xe xe, Mark.
I’ve downloaded Scrivener for a test drive, and it certainly does look wonderful.
One feature I have puzzled out yet: May I print a copy of an outline or a .tiff or .png of one view of the cards without recourse to Grab?
You can currently print out images, web pages, PDF files and text etc, but you cannot print the outliner or corkboard views. You can, however, use File > Compile Draft to print only the titles and synopses of your documents to print an outline of anything inside the Draft folder. (Right now, at the tail end of upgrades to the corkboard for the next update, I am about to start adding the ability to print off the corkboard as cards; I will be looking at a way of printing the outliner too.)
All the best,
Keith
P.S. I can’t give better info than Mark about the word processors; Scrivener does indeed play well with Nisus and Mellel - and even better in the next update - but Pages, alas, does not properly support the most standard rich text format - RTF - and thus cannot import footnotes, images etc from anything exported from Scrivener.
Scrivener, Mellel and Bookends are a great combo, especially for academics.
In Bookends you can set the Word Processor (in General settings) to Scrivener so you can easily swap and exchange references between boths apps.
In Scrivener as a default the shortcut cmd+y is already in use for something else but I changed it so it is this one shortcut for all three programs.
The citations will appear in curly brackets in your Scrivener texts (that’s the default, you can change it in Bookends’ Scan&Bib/Citation Delimiters).
After exporting to Mellel in rtf format you will find that the footnotes look pretty ugly. That’s because Mellel uses a rtf footnote format as a default. Change it to your_footnotes/your_endnotes and the ugly ducklings turn into swans.
Then you have to convert the citations in delimiters to proper citation Mellel elements (via the Bibliography menu, it’s not in the palette!).
After that if you had set the Reference Manager in Mellel to Bookends you can convert the citations to final format just like citations generated in Mellel itself. Even if Bookends’ word processor is still set to Scrivener. Only if you want to insert references from Bookends directly into Mellel you have to change Bookends’ reference manager, permanent or temporarily.
When it comes to references the three make a good team, as soon as you got it how it works you’ll have a smooth work flow.
All other structuring elements, headings, the great new cross references etc., must be added manually because the rtf format doesn’t know anything about these Mellel features.