Plain Text

[mnott]

@reepicheep

@brookter

… The reason I’m asking is that it’s not strictly true to say that Scrivener doesn’t have a style system: it does. Or rather it has a measure of semantic formatting attached to document titles: each level of folder, document group and binder can have its title and text formatted individually (each with a different font if needed), so that it’s possible to have differently formatted Titles, subtitles, heading, subheadings, sections, subsections and so on. This is all done at Compilation time, so you can have different settings to suit different publisher’s requirements.

Apologies if you already know this – I wasn’t sure from your description.

Of course, there will be documents which are so complicated in structure that it is difficult (perhaps impossible to achieve), but I thought that some people reading the thread might come away with the impression that it’s not possible to override headings and so on for different publishers, and of course, in general that’s not true.

I’m into those “complicated” documents so the simplistic stuff of Binder’s Folders isn’t good enough. For example, I’d want to mark up inline quotes, block quotes, scientific name, foreign phrase, emphasised phrase (those last three or semantically different and need to be visualised differently), publication title, publication year, publisher, etc etc etc etc. And for fiction I want to be able to markup dialogue and then have either the British or American conventions for speech marks appear or the Spanish, French, German. or Swahili specific versions show up. So yes a full on generalised markup of text that is independent of some particular realisation on a specific presentation device—be that screen, e-book, paper, or whatever. And no I do not want to have to continue with the procedural markup of Markdown or the quasi-generaic-but-still-procedural markup of LaTeX; I want to generically mark the text up once and then have Compile generate the appropriate final forms.

Hey there, reepicheep,

would you mind sharing more specifically your idea about the production workflow? I’m asking because I’m the author of TeXDown (https://github.com/mnott/texdown), which I had contributed last week, and I am now rewriting it from ground up in an object oriented way, since the script the way I had it was really getting messy already. As such, I am looking for ideas what you would like to do. So I’m already having a dynamic selection of asset collections, either on the command line or through configuration file. I likewise can’t work with MMD etc, since it completely doesn’t cover what I need in terms of markdown - just like you, apparently. I need more options there, so I’m adding my own parser (and actually now making it configurable). But then I don’t know what you mean by “procedural markdown” vs. “generically mark the text up.”

So I write, for example, of course some markups into my text. I’m a very seasoned LaTeX person, with more than 25 years under the belt. I can no problem do amazing stuff on LaTeX. But still, I look for options of getting that code out of my eyesight (even though I’m a programmer and I like code). But on the other hand, I need to tell the formatter what the hell I want, so that’s when I need some way of markup (or down). And clearly I need plain text, because, well.

TeXDown, which I’m contributing for free, is really building on my own experience with LaTeX only, combined with having written about 120 papers over the last 3 years as part of my MBA, and many papers before in Physics and Chemistry, about 20 years ago. So it is biased towards what I do. Which sucks. It also is for me a little playground to experiment with new ways of programming, so it’s not going to be very perfect, or even nice. I personally think the code is probably crappy, since I suck big time as a Perl programmer.

But it allows me to help myself and some other students to get their job done faster, without having to go all the way through to understanding LaTeX under the hood. It also allows me to come up with a template that people can easily use, to get an awesome output without having so much to worry about LaTeX at all.

It’s really taking down LaTeX to what I mostly need every day (hence, “TeXDown”) while at the same time allowing me to add any LaTeX code anywhere, right in Scrivener, without having ever to worry about that.

So what would you want? Please share specific things how you would like them work, as I may be interested in integrating some of those things into my next version.

[kewms]

@mnott

But then again, Scrivener is not headed as an integrated development environment (IDE) - though it clearly should be. It could be the Eclipse of authors. It is clearly able to do it if just some things were put on new feet.

And don’t forget, it does it’s job probably excellently for the vast majority of (novel) writers.

Scrivener is not intended to be an IDE or a Content Management System. That is, no doubt, why you find it lacking in those areas.

I don’t speak for the developer, so I’m not going to say this will “never” change. But I will say that your needs appear to be very different from the vast majority of Scrivener users, and so it is difficult to make a business case for the substantial development effort your requests would require.

Katherine

[mnott]

Katherine, I know where you’re coming from. Makes sense.

That’s why, in total contradiction to this guy called Friedman, I provide my extension for free

M