Scrivener and technical manuals

A little recap of my findings, one year later.

  • Quarto looks like the most promising way of making websites out of Scrivener. In general, it looks like the most promising way of making online manuals.

  • There are clever templates/scripts that can make the Scrivener-Quarto workflow automatic. At the moment, none of these seem to be able to generate a multi-page website.

  • By following the workflow described here, and Ioa’s script, a Scrivener project can be output as separate markdown files. These can then be assembled in a Quarto project, and output as a multi-page website.

  • The index in the sidebar has, at the moment, to be compiled manually. I’ve yet to explore the automatic generation features of Quarto. These, however, can only generate an alphabetically ordered index, that would in any case have to be manually reorganized.

This latter looks, at the moment, the most promising workflow for what I want to do (authoring technical manuals in Scrivener, and making a website of them).

Despite KB’s intention not to implement this workflow in Scrivener, third-party templates/scripts are evolving, and may make the procedure easier in the future.

Paolo

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