Hi
I am now using Scrivener for pretty much all of my writing outputs. I have just started a course at Open University. In the near future, I will need to produce a research report. Does anyone know of a suitable template in Scrivener, ideally formatted? I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time formatting. Any ideas or recommendations?
Many thanks, Ash
If this project is for Open University, do they have formatting requirements for submissions to them?
For most of my long form stuff (technical and non-Fiction) i use the Non Fiction Latex template which produces a deliverable that would look good to academics. works well out of the box but over the years i have made small tweaks.
Hi Ash,
Would I be right in presuming you will need to produce a number of such reports, or do you expect it to be only one?
That said, without knowing the specifications required by the OU it is difficult to advise. But, basically, you have two options for academic writing: (1) stay with the native rich-text and compile to RTF, DOCX or ODT; (2) go the MultiMarkdown > Pandoc route leading to many high-quality outputs. which, if you haven’t worked that way, will come with a learning curve.
If you choose (1), I’d spend time checking out the various templates in the Non-Fiction category to see which is closest to your needs and then spend the time to make your own modified version of it, complete with compile format.
If you choose (2) I would spend a bit of time browsing the MultiMarkdown and Latex forum where there is plenty of advice.
And do yourself a favour, and use a bibliography manager; for a lot of us Mac-users, Bookends is the one to go for, but if cost is an issue, Zotero is an alternative. But do read this Wiki on reference software.
Mark
To offer another parallel line of approach to the above, if the template they are giving you to follow is in Word or OpenOffice format, than I would say that in most cases the easiest and best way to use it will be to go through all of the styles that it needs to format the text properly, and then create those styles in your project. Don’t worry so much about what they look like. That can be whatever you want in fact, and I encourage using formatting that suits your eye rather than by rote, labouring to make it look as someone else wants. The key thing here is the styled text is compiled as styled, and such text can be imported or inserted into .docx or .odt file such that the original formatting is stripped clean and the whole thing adopts the desired template design automatically.
I know less (okay, almost nothing) about this in Word, but have done quite a lot of testing and application of the theory in LibreOffice, and share some of my thoughts in this post, which itself links off to a few more practical examples of the workflow (including sample projects), as the post itself is more an abstract overview, and expansion on the above summary.
Otherwise, I myself would go the Markdown route, via Pandoc or Quarto. The above workflow is compatible with it in fact, and if anything requires less overhead because the quality of the .docx/.odt output is a lot cleaner and more friendly to a stylesheet driven way of working, than Scrivener is out of the box. That other advantages to do so are in any kind of content that goes beyond paragraphs of text. Figures, equations, tables—all of that will just be better using Scrivener’s markup workflow.
And yeah, if Open University takes .tex files, that LaTeX project template will get you well on the way to integrating with any boilerplate they provide.
Many thanks. I have put time aside to look at the NF latex Template. Will report back. Much appreciated.
Thanks Mark, really helpful.
I will look at the Forums
Bookends looks like a very helpful add-on too.
Great help - thanks
Thanks very much, particularly for post links !
Don’t miss the instructions in the file at the top of the Binder. Complete, concise, and correct. A job well done by L&L.
FYI, in the years I’ve used this template I’ve not found a need to go down the Pandoc route as suggested by others. So I can’t compare and contrast. But I understand from posts here it’s a well-trodden route also. For me it was just more stuff to figure out at the expense of my time spent writing. Just me. But if Open University has peculiar requirements, of course important to understand those requirements and have a way to deliver to those requirements and Pandoc method may give the flexibility.
Enjoy your learning!
So true - I would not usually give this time for my fiction projects. Just seems you need to be more grown up in academia
The way I put it is: if you have any sense that you may need something other than PDF (or a .tex file), then Markdown is a pretty good nexus format to learn (and a lot of it is as basic as “learning” how to format a post in a forum like this). Pandoc in particular can take one single source and go many dozens of different places with it, from InDesign to Word to DocBook to LaTeX to ePub to wikis and so on. You won’t get stuck going down that path, whereas going native .tex—while there are conversion tools for it, Pandoc included—it’s a bit like RTF in that it isn’t designed for conversion and is itself meant to be an extremely expressive format that may often have no literal 1:1 translation to any other formats.