Choice is good. Competition is good. It drives creativity in application design. I have to say though that I’m happy to be back in the bosom of Scrivener after trying to write a few technical articles in Ulysses for Mac. It’s a nice, simple app. But Scrivener just feels better for me. And with Folder sync to Dropbox and iA Writer Pro on iPad I’m good to go for mobile writing.
Probably preaching to the choir here. Nor am I providing any new insights. Just saying 
Ian
Hi Ian,
Glad you’re still enjoying Scrivener even after trying out such excellent competition as Ulysses. We’re not standing still, either, even though it may seem so at the moment. The next free update will have a spruced-up, more Yosemite/El Capitan-style UI, and next year we’ll have a more significant update, too.
All the best,
Keith
Thanks for the news. I am curious to know if the imminent (so it seems) upgrade would contain the most important feature that you have announced many times: namely paragraph and character styles. It is not clear if these styles would be compatible with Nisus and MSWord Styles…
Have a wonderful day.
Character and paragraph styles will be coming in the major update sometime next year, not in the minor UI refresh that will be out soonish. They are part of a much bigger overhaul. They will be compatible with Nisus and Word when exported to RTF/Word format.
Thanks Keith. Looking forward to the tweaked UI.
Ian
Just out of curiosity, is this more significant update going to be Scrivener 3.0 as opposed to a free v2 update? Just wondering if I should start saving now 
.
The major update to which I am referring will indeed be a paid update, sometime in 2016.
This is welcome news indeed, Keith! I don’t know whether this has been addressed, but I’m curious about one issue in particular: formatting of bold and italic characters. In the main online publication I write for, which uses WordPress, italics use and bold uses . But when I do that formatting in an rtf editor like Scrivener or TextEdit, the comparable formatting is and , respectively, which means that formatting doesn’t show up in the final story. It’s not really a big deal to do the formatting after the story’s imported into the WP editor, but when I’m occasionally writing short pieces in Markdown in iAWriter, it does save a few seconds to do the correct formatting as I write.
Obviously this is not so onerous as to make me use Ulysses instead of Scrivener, for reasons I outlined in another thread, but I’m curious to know whether this kind of formatting will be available in the next version of Scrivener, or maybe it’s possible now and I just don’t know how to do it!
Apologies for my ignorance here; as should be clear by now, I know little about web publishing; fortunately, my needs are so simple that those are the major formatting issues I deal with. Most of the copy I write elsewhere is submitted as rtf files and no editor has complained about that yet, so I assume they’re doing any reformatting needed on their end.
I look forward to hearing more details on next year’s major update when they’re ready for revealing. Oh, and feel free to move this post to a more appropriate thread if you like.
And just to bring up one thing that may already be known, but if that is what you’re doing in other programs, you can already do that with Scrivener. It may not have a user interface that is wrapped around the concept of markup like Ulysses, but you can definitely type in a Markdown document and use the MultiMarkdown -> HTML compile option to produce a clean file for WordPress like you are accustomed to with these other programs. The compiler can also produce some basic MultiMarkdown like headings based on your outline structure (using the Title checkbox in the Formatting pane).
Hi, yet another Portlander brett
I write in Markdown in Scrivener and then just copy and paste the Markdown directly into WordPress (into Text rather than Visual view).
There is an option in WordPress > Settings > Writing that needs to be enabled:
[] Use Markdown for posts and pages.
This option does not preclude HTML. It just enables MD to be used on the site as well.
Can output MD to HTML in Scrivener, of course.
Scrivener doesn’t offer the preview option for MD that iA Writer does, but Marked2 (brettterpstra.com/contact/) does. Marked2 works beautifully with Scrivener and offers some great tools. Brett is also very KB- and Ioa-like in responding quickly to user queries.
Used MD in Scrivener for some time without Marked2. Was good, but fiddly. Marked2 makes the whole process far easier. A good $10 investment.
Find Scrivener easier for MD than iA Writer (which I use on my iPad). Each article is split into two (or more files): one or more for the body text and one for any links. I split the Editor to have the body text in one window and the links in the other. Helps to speed the whole process up. Or it does for me.
Thanks all! Will try those strategies this week and probably report back with more ignorant questions shortly thereafter.