I have written several internationally published user manuals for technology products, all created in MS Word on a Mac.
I would like to improve my workflow and felt Scriverner would be a way of doing that. Unfortunately, I am finding getting started is proving to be a significantly different and challenging environment. I feel having a “User Manual” template would help bridge the transition. Where can I find a blank “Users Manual” template?
I looked at the Scrivener manual but it is not available as a blank template and it uses a markup language. Being pre-populated and requiring learning a markup language makes using it as a start point counter-productive. I need something simple to get the ball rolling without delaying my current project more than necessary.
If you haven’t already, I’d recommend taking a look at our Interactive Tutorial, available from the Help menu. It’s a good overview of fundamental operations like editing and formatting.
The nature of Scrivener is that it separates the writing and formatting tasks much more rigorously than, say, Word does. While in Word it’s a good idea to define your stylesheet up front, Scrivener assumes that you may (probably will!) need several output documents with different formatting requirements and is designed to facilitate that. Most people will advise you to just start writing – see the Tutorial for guidance there – and figure out the formatting aspect of things later.
The templates that Scrivener does supply are just starter projects with particular settings: there’s nothing in any of the templates that you couldn’t do yourself. For that reason, I usually start with the “Blank” template. Alternatively, perhaps one of the non-fiction templates is close to what you need?