I bought Scrivener and so far I have ported a cookbook project and a novel into it. I love it!
Now I’d like to get more ambitious and port a technical document to it. I figured out how to do the equations and tables, and how to use multi-markdown, yes. (thanks to fletcher and that video on LaTeXit) But how to get a numbered outline into action, and how to number figures and tables in such a way that their numbers automatically change when the document is re-arranged in the binder?
The Scrivener Manual exhibits this type of formatting, but does not itself explain how to do it (at least not in a way that silly me could find!) I also read “Take Control of Scrivener 2.0” to no avail. Is there a howto somewhere on this?
Since you are using MMD for your technical work, you’ll have no problem with this sort of stuff. The user manual does not go too heavily into MMD syntax itself, since that is already documented elsewhere, and captioning and referencing are purely matters of syntax. Scrivener itself does not have any aids for this like it does with footnotes and title headings.
Basically, in MMD a target anchor is automatically created whenever an item is labelled in some way. For section titles, this is just the name of the section. So if you have a binder item named “Auxiliary Outputs”, you could create a cross-reference to that in the text with [b][Auxiliary Outputs][][/b]. This linking syntax uses two square-bracket fields. The first one is visible to the reader and the second is for when you want the visible text to not resemble the linking text. So in the above example, [b][this would be a 'natural' cross reference][Auxiliary Outputs][/b]. In the final rendering, the user would see “this would be a ‘natural’ cross reference” as a hyperlink in HTML, or a LaTeX reference as you see in the user manual.
Figures can be captioned in Scrivener by adding a double-quoted phrase after the image itself, on the same line. Images are however linked via their original file name, when using them in Scrivener. Ordinarily you would type in the figure ID yourself, but if you drag in images and let Scrivener compile and gather them for you, it will just use the filename as the ID. They are linked to in the same manner as above—only the target would be ‘something.jpg’ instead of ‘Auxiliary Outputs’.
Tables can be captioned as well (and incidentally in LaTeX, captioning means more than just putting some fancy text on the page—it means numbering, link anchoring, and the ability to construct lists of tables and figures in the appendix, if you wish). Check the MMD syntax for tables and how to caption them. The caption text is used as the ID reference for linking purposes.
Numbered outlines: I’m assuming you just mean enumerated or bullet lists? If so just type them out like you would in an e-mail or text editor.
[code]* This is a bullet list
You can also use hyphens
If you think that looks better
MMD doesn’t even care if you switch types
You can also nest lists with the tab key
And incidentally, this is an enumerated list
MMD doesn’t actually care what numbers you use
You can use the same number over and over
All it looks for is a number+dot+space pattern
It will re-number the items for you[/code]
Sectional numbering you get for free—just make sure you have Titles turned on in the appropriate rows in Scrivener’s compile Formatting pane.
Wow Amber, thank you so much for the detailed repsonse! I have saved in my Scrivener notes resources and will be teasing it apart over the coming weeks to make sure I got it all
These types of workflows wouldn’t be possible were it not for Scrivener, so I guess I’ll take the plunge! There will be much to uncover, such as how/if floating tables and images can be made.
I’d have to check, but I’m pretty sure MMD uses floats for
images, and I know it uses floating mini-pages for tables. I mean
that in a literal LaTeX feature sense though. They won’t wrap
text by default: they’ll come out as centre-aligned figures.
