M, thank you very much…trying what you mentioned worked well. You’re right, once you get the hang of it, the transition time is minimal. Thanks for taking the time to help!
My usage is in academic writing, and one in which lots of tranliterated words are used. I also suscribe, out of being burnt many times in the past with the “MS Word”-induced mentality of “format as you go”, to the idea of keeping content and style separate. In Mellel, I use styles. It is what draws me to LaTeX, though I agree with others that looking back at a “marked-up” doc is not pretty. I use RTF; I just wish there was a way in Scrivener (or anything) to associate semantic meaning to the visual tags such as italics, etc. Anyways, those are reasons why I still don’t find the flow from Scriv to Mellel still instantaneous: I’m still having to go through the text, and apply my semantic-based “Styles” to the book titles, transliterated words, etc. And while this is not a big deal with a two or three page document, it would be a major headache for a longer, structured work like a thesis or monograph.
Again, this isn’t a fault of Scrivener, or of Mellel, but just of the state of the art.
For academic writing (and maybe other types), I do think it would be nice to have the ability to apply definable Styles in Scriv, just as we can in Mellel and (eek) Word. Then, all it would take would be for someone to write some xslt’s or what have you to transfer the document and its styles immediately and effortlessly from Scriv to Mellel (or to LaTeX, or to…), without losing the semantic meanings of the styles.
But that’s another issue, for a different thread. 