The page layout and the whole appearance of Scrivener’s User Manual have always seemed very elegant to me. I hope I’m not too curious when asking how exactly it was made: simply with a Scrivener document compiled and then exported to an editor like Nisus, or …? As far as I can see, the Manual itself doesn’t say anything about this.
Anyway, the layout of the Manual would seem to be a very useful template for all kinds of readers, theses etc.
Hi Timotheus,
It is indeed written and created using Scrivener, although because it’s written by Scrivener, it’s all written using MultiMarkdown syntax. You can download the Scrivener project used to generate the manual from our support page, in fact:
literatureandlatte.com/support.php
(Note that the version on our support page hasn’t yet been updated to 2.4, but will be shortly.)
All the best,
Keith
Thanks, Keith! That’s another good reason for learning the MultiMarkdown syntax!
Yup! I’m working on getting that updated right now. Originally I was just going to post a content update once Win 1.5 and Mac 2.4 were out, but I’ve decided to do a very long overdue retrofit to MMD3 so that the average person can actually see how it works. Right now it is using the old MMD2, which requires one to know how to find and install the legacy MultiMarkdown, install XSLT files, and just generally geek out for a a few hours to get their system set up enough to even begin thinking about compiling. It is even worse on Windows, where MMD2 based technology requires one to install a full Perl installation as well as some other stuff that comes for free on most UNIX-based systems. When it comes to compile you can’t even do it straight out any more. You have to compile to a plain MMD file and use the command line to continue the process by hand.
In short, it fails as a demonstration of how Scrivener can generate nice LaTeX documents, and doesn’t reflect the modern state of how one should use it to do so. So I’m working on getting that streamlined and updated to MultiMarkdown version 3 and hope to have that uploaded soon. There is one ingredient that has been missing from the compiler that has held me back from doing this: regular expressions. With a more advanced form of search and replace in the Replacements compile option pane, I can now do custom typesetting work directly in Scrivener, rather than delegating that to post-processing scripts (which MMD3 does not fully support any more).
Uh, so all of that jibber-jabber means: I’m making it easier to use. 
I’m shooting for people being able to select “MultiMarkdown -> PDF” as a compile for option and get a copy of the PDF 15 seconds later, exactly in the condition we distribute it in. I may be able to, with a little slight of hand.
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This is very welcome news! The Scrivener Manual is quite beautiful and I’ve peeked under the hood to compare the Scrivener Project with the PDF version of the manual, but found the source files and compile settings a bit beyond my comprehension. And although the more I study them the more clear they become, a streamlined process or primer about MMD3>LaTeX would be most helpful.
I am constantly astounded at what Scrivener can do and with the scope of the Scrivener Manual. Thank you for all of your work on this!
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I can’t promise to bring clarity to that aspect, perhaps when I have some time I’ll write something explaining myself in plain English rather than in littered code comments; it would be nice to do that. The main thing I mean by streamlining is that it will use the available systems provided in the installer (LaTeX excluded, naturally), rather than requiring the bunch of installation of legacy scripts and having to carefully walk it through a long compilation process.
(nine months later)
just to know: is this ‘streamlined’, MMD 3 oriented copy of the user manual already available?
Check out the Scapple manual, it’s made for MMD3, and requires no extra components to properly compile. Everything is set up in the compile settings.
That promises to be very helpful. Thanks, Amber!
I’m not finding the MMD version (for macOS) in the User Manuals. Only the PDF seems to be there. Did the copy of the .scriv project move?
It’s the bottom item (ZIP file) in the dropdown.
Mac / ScrivProject / ZIP
Whoops – my bad.
There’s a scroll bar on the dlld list. It’s at the bottom after scrolling down.
I have it now.
Thank you.