TEXTVIEW/Markdown-Option and MORE TARGETS

Scrivener Scrivener for macOS
1

Hi there,

just two ideas, that keep coming to my mind when working with this great piece of software:

  1. Textview/Markdown
    I would really like the option to just use the editor in a text-only-way. Like Ulysses is dealing with text. I’m writing text. So: Let’s deal with it that way. (At least: Have the option to deal with it this way.) This would make it very easy to change the font to view the text. I would like that.

  2. More ways to set targets:
    I have a big target for a whole project and want to keep track of it. But I also have smaller ones like: Finish this chapter with 2000 words until DATE. It would be great if this could be implemented somehow.

Thanks!
JC

2

Thanks for the feedback!

  1. Here is a prior response to that request.
  2. Have a look at §21.3, Goals and Statistics Tracking Tools, starting on pg. 306 of the user manual PDF. With the exception of date-based goals, you already have a lot of options here. You can even track progress per individual chunk, view a list of progress bars for each chunk in the Compiler, define and track goals per section by assigning a goal to a container folder and more.
3

Would it not be possible to have a sort of a fake plain-text mode? Like a “view entire binder in default font” kind of thing?

I can see why RTF is integral, but I also like the idea of not being distracted by formatting options - so it would be great to be able to ignore that and just set some basic default formatting and work in that. Right now fonts are a bit of a jumble for me and definitely a distraction.

Kind of in the opposite direction but a similar use case - an option to compile RTF to markdown would be pretty cool. Maybe I’m just missing it because Scrivener clearly has lots of MMD support, but it doesn’t seem to convert RTF formatting to MMD. --> This would be great because again, I can largely ignore formatting while writing, just adding the basics (ie paragraph, bold, header, etc) and not being distracted by any minor inconsistencies (paragraphs with slightly different font, etc), and then can later compile it in LaTex to get a clean document. I hope this is not a redundant post/idea, as I am still exploring all of what Scrivener offers.

4

Sounds like a very good idea to me. And it would be a perfect solution for my case as well. Just me and my text and maybe, but not necessary basic formatting like bold, italics.

JC

5

That’s not really possible since the font is part of rich text, that’s just what rich text is. If you want to change the font for all of your text, you can already do that by changing the default font and then choosing all your documents and using the Documents > Convert menu to convert them all to the current default style. At any rate, Scrivener is a rich text application, not a plain text one, that is just part of what Scrivener is designed to be, and it’s moving even further in that direction with true styles in the future, so I’m afraid that a plain text mode (even a fake one) is off the table.

Some sort of RTF -> Markdown export is on the list, though for a potential future version, although it is hugely complex so I can’t say when that would be.

All the best,
Keith

6

Perhaps you could style the editor and text as whatever your preferred version of plain-text is (a nice monospace font, for example?), and then compile the document to .txt.

For the time being, I’ve set up my Scriv using Options > Formatting with Droid Sans Mono 12 (click in somewhere in the text entry example with the Nietzsche quote and then the A button in the top-left of that section to set the font, size, and style). A well-scaled monospace font makes MultiMarkdown composition easy and crisp. Click “Use Formatting in Current Editor” to apply changes to the current project. This will cause new projects and documents to be created with this ‘plain view’ be default. (You can also use the “Manage…” dropdown to save your theme adjustments for later use, in case you want to have a variety of theme presets.)

From your newly ‘fake’ plain-text editor, copy a chunk of text and use it to define a formatting preset (Format > Formatting > New Preset From Selection). Name it something evocative, like “Vanilla Text” or “Markdown Style” or whatever. Now select the Draft in the Binder, switch into Scrivenings mode (View > Scrivenings), select all your text (Cmd-A or Edit > Select All), and apply your newly-created Vanilla Text preset (Format > Formatting > Apply Preset > Whatever-you-named-it). Voilà! Plain text faked.

For the actual generation of plain text, once your composition is complete, you could Compile the document to Plain Text (thereby retaining any comments, inline footnotes, etc. in your Scriv doc, but stripping them from the compiled file). Or if you don’t use those features, just select-all and copy-paste into TextWrangler or whatever your favorite plain-ol-vanilla text editor is.

So, I suggest that Scrivener already has the ability to fake plain text, without too much work-- and you can get it to look exactly how you want. :slight_smile:

Finally, there’s the option to compile to Markdown, and I’ve heard (but haven’t tested it myself) that Marked2 can preview live Scrivener files to show how the Markdown is coming along. These might be additional features to check out if that’s your kind of thing. There are quite a few people out there with blog entries on using Scrivener to manage their Markdown blog posts, you might check those resources out, too.

7

Keith, any ideas about when this style feature set might be on the horizon?

I think it’s a great idea that would really help with my usage scenario. (Of course, I realize there’s a lot going on with the iOS version etc.)

I’m planning to use Scrivener to write my PhD thesis. It has been a bit of a bear to get all the tools to cooperate properly, but I think I have a provisional workflow. (That said, styles capability in Scriv would streamline things nicely.)

Presently, I’m planning to compose in MultiMarkdown in Scrivener, export to OpenOffice for a Zotero citation management scheme, and then export to RTF, open in Nisus Writer Pro, convert the markdown using a macro available from their forum (see http://nisus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=4013&p=27516&hilit=markdown#p27516), and then use Nisus to create a create a Table of Contents that links neatly to the final PDF. (I’m using APA style, so that works fairly well.)

However, the trouble arises when my thesis supervisor and committee members send an RTF or .doc back to me with comments, and I want to reincorporate these back into the document. Going from styled text to Markdown, etc. seems a bit of a pain.

I realize that a workaround has been proposed to set up distinct styles and find-replace the style attributes in a powerful word processor (which Nisus could certainly do), but I wonder if true styling is somewhere in the works, and whether I should hope for it to come out sometime within the next six months, or just press on with my Markdown kludge.

Any other suggestions, of course, would be quite welcome. :slight_smile:

thanks! & keep up the great work. :wink:

8

Keith’s second post in this thread may or may not be relevant. (He’s previously described creating the “style feature set” as - words to the effect - a very large job.)

9

Thanks Hugh-- that’s what I figured, but I was hoping some polite clamoring might speed things along. :wink:

Also, as to the ‘fake plain text’ mode, I didn’t notice AmberV’s post from 2011 (which is a sticky on this forum!): http://literatureandlatte.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=14412&start=0

This last points to a prefs file that will do all that stuff I suggested, albeit requiring less effort from the user.

10

Sorry to derail the thread a bit, but why such a complex workflow? Why not just do MMD -> FODT and do everything in Open/LibreOffice?

Back on topic, yes, AmberV’s post is absolutely on track — Scrivener already can be manhandled into “doing” plain text pretty easily…

11

Sorry for the late reply on this. Styles is mostly in place internally, but the Compile-side of styles still needs implementing (allowing you to override styles etc). Styles are part of the next major iteration of Scrivener, though, and I’m afraid that I don’t think that will be ready for release before 2016 - it’s been in the works for two years already, but is a major rewrite, with a lot of modernisation going on “under the hood” so that Scrivener should be in good repair for the next ten years of development.

All the best,
Keith