One ring to rule them all, tis Scrivener to bind them.
That includes research, scientific papers, peer reviews, grant applications, course material, personal and work letters (for which I Pandoc > LaTeX letter class so my letters have address, letter-head and signature with no effort from my part), some presentations (RevealJS, though I’m also a fan of the app Deckset which works better with plain markdown thus one more step if I use scrivener…). When i am at talks or conferences, I use iOS Scrivener and a folding bluetooth keyboard, and have years of notes of every academic talk I’ve attended, all in one project.
Since its early beta in 2016 I’ve used Scrivener for everything, including magazine articles and books and the research for same, and, until I retired a few years ago, for editing a national magazine in all phases, from managing the submissions to writing dejection letters to the editing back-and-forth with authors and the final output to the talented folks in production.
Its my tool of choice for all writing because, of all the other options out there–I started with Wordstar way back in the last century and switched to Microsoft Word when it hit version 1.01–Scrivener is the only program developed by a writer. Writers may have been there in the gestational stages of some of the big-budget programs, but they were quickly taken over by the corporate wing and made to be all tools for all purposes, which means the same as A tool for no purpose in particular.
For me, Scrivener and its flexible little packets of text strung together by an outliner works as I do. Except for compile. But then I only have to output raw manuscript pages in 12-point Times Roman, and needn’t fiddle around with Drop Caps and flush-left and block quotes and dramatic passages emphasized by embarrassingly garish fonts.
IMHO Best advice, only move a few “large and active” writing projects, and don’t do it for “everything”. You won’t be pleased if you, for example, move letters with letterhead or special formatting. Use a word processor (Word, Pages, or whatever) for that kind of stuff.
Thanks for the kind advice. I should have been clearer. I’m only “copying current work in process” to Scrivener. I will continue to use Word or Pages for formal reports that need to be formatted professionally.
To note :
If the goal is to centralize everything, even without moving the whole of your work into a Scrivener project you can still link to files destined to other apps, inside your project (either in a list, or create a document per), which link will automatically launch and load that file in whatever app is the default for its format when clicked.
You can do so by dropping the said file straight into a document (in the editor), or using the bookmarks panel.
Well, Scrivener can produce documents are “formatted professionally”. Lots of professionals use Scrivener to produce professionally formatted documents by using the Scrivener Compile Process.
Remember when you put these writing projects into Scrivener to “chunk” them up into smaller individual Scrivener documents, using the “split” function.
I second that.
I used to think the Scrivener Compiler was difficult to follow and a tad confusing.
I still think it can be streamlined in certain aspects. The section types assigned in the project settings can work as section layouts unequivocally. In other words, to let the compiler handle those sections as they were created, rather than manually assigning the section layout to possibly manually select and interchange them later on—but I could be oversimplifying a more complex way to simplify this.
Now I have different customized output formats, each for the specific work I am planning to put out.
The only thing I want to stress is that LaTeX manages to perfectly format the finished product, without titles being just entered before the end of the page or the like.
I think going forward, the L&L team can think of ways to make the compiling process feel a bit more approachable (but it just takes a little bit of practice and experimentation) and the output feel as robust as LaTeX.
Would that even be possible?
Having said that, I am addicted to tweaking around and fiddling with the compiler to find the perfect solution for my ideal format.
Most other pieces of software really struggle with that; in fact, iA Writer does not include anything close to that which does not require proper CSS programming, and Microsoft Word is not conceptualized to have an output that is different from the editor.
Exactly this. Compile remains one of Scrivener’s differentiating features. Other apps have adopted the Binder metaphor, but AFAIK no other developers seem up to the task of a truly flexible and sophisticated UI-driven export process.
This is partly why new users can be so overwhelmed: they’ve never encountered a feature like it. But for those who persevere and succeed in wrapping their mind around it, Compile can be a beautiful thing.
Yes, many authors do use Scrivener just in part. They limit themselves with only relying on the organisational features and little more. And that is fine.
But I appreciate, just like most of us (as I can read), that there are options for only using one software for most if not all tasks.
I am curious to try the new L&L app, to see how it compares with Scrivener in the output or composing side.
I am sure it will not stand a good one to one comparason, but it might be an answer for many that find Scrivener overwhelming.
