Successful doctoral thesis in Scrivener

Just wanted to drop a note to say thank you to the Scrivener team. I have recently successfully completed my DPhil at Oxford, and actually finished somewhat early compared to my deadline. I wrote the thesis almost entirely in Scrivener, compiling to Pandoc-flavoured Markdown and then LaTeX. For all the little (and big!) things I’d like to see happen with Scrivener, I am mostly grateful that it is such a flexible tool. The critical thing about it is that I was able to organise and reorganise my thoughts and writing over a long period of time. Thank you!

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Congratulations on completing your degree. I hope you’ve toasted your accomplishment. You deserve it.

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Well done! Congratulations!

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Dedistis fidem! Congratulations!

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Congratulations. I wrote my D.Phil, on an Amstrad 8512, in the dark ages before Scrivener, but my subsequent students and graduates have greatly benefited from its flexibility features.

How did you put in all of your references? I’m struggling with that as I’m coming from work where it can do it automatically.

So I used pandoc references, e.g. [@Smith2017 p. 27] which it happily converts to BibLaTeX \cite commands. Citation formatting was actually one of the main reasons I use LaTeX. It’s not possible, as far as I can tell, to get automatic citation formatting correct in many humanities styles using CSL-based citation formatting (such as pandoc’s own citation formatting). A nice advantage of using pandoc as an intermediate stage is that I could easily produce a Word document, which was useful for working with my supervisor. The citations weren’t fully style-guide-compliant in Word but it didn’t matter for a temporary document.

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Cool! Congratulations. Coincidently, I completed mine last Wednesday, in ancient philosophy. Also compiling to Pandoc-flavoured Markdown, then using Quarto, LaTeX and so on.

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Ok thank you for your message back. I have to say I’m totally lost. I’ll have to do my research, I have no idea what pandoc BibLaTeX or LaTeX is. :smile: But thanks for the heads up will look all that stuff up now.

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As a first step, perhaps simply do an interweb search for “What is LaTeX” to get some good articles. LaTeX is very powerful and has been around for years.

I also am unfamiliar with BibLaTeX, but I notice there are articles on the interweb, e.g. Getting started with BibLaTeX - Overleaf, Online LaTeX Editor

As a third step, take a look at the Scrivener-supplied “General Non-Fiction (LaTeX)” template. It’s really good. Excellent instructions for use are provided at the top of the binder. Give it a shot with a simple test Scrivener project.

All my output from Scrivener destined for LaTeX production of paper and PDF versions uses this template, with a few tweaks over the years. Never found need to use pandoc or markdown, but I can see how those technologies might be useful to some.

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The only problem with all this is that, if you click on @Storyofus’ avatar, he lists his platform as “Mobile”. So if he only has Scriv for iPadOS…

:slight_smile:

Mark

What is markdown? Yes I only have the iPad one.

Ah. Yes. A problem. Ok to edit/work on a Scrivener project that is destined for LaTeX compile, but macOS version need to do it. I’d really avoid trying to do the bulk of PhD work on an iPad. Good catch.

Again, do a search on the “interweb” for “markdown” to see some terrific explanations.

If you move to macOS then a citation manager that plays well with Scrivener is Bookends. It will manage your bibliography and citations. It allows to use any citation stye that is out there (Chicago, etc) or create your own custom style. Plus a lot more.

I do not work for them but am a very satisfied customer.

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I should add that I too have been greatly helped by Bookends. The developer is responsive to (reasonable) requests. I didn’t actually end up using its citation formatter, instead using it to manage my PDF/Epub library, and to generate a BibLaTeX references file which pandoc and LaTeX then consumed.

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