Dear Sirs, I am evaluating the possibility to switch to Scivener for our technical manual, currently written in LibreOffice.
The final printout is well over 800 pages, and it is mecoming unmanegeable il LibreOffice.
Can you kindly confirm if Scrivener is able to:
Manage such a huge book without significant slowdown
To include the same section or paragraph in many parts of the manual
I should explain the latter briefly.
Our manual is about the configuration of several hardware devices, alf as an example many device have a serial line to be configured. This part is currently written in a separate file “Serial Line Configuration” and the same file is included multiple times, one for each device that have a serial line to be configured.
Eventually when we update the external file and generate the book again, all section sparse in the final manual will be updated.
Is this something possible with Scrivener?
Thanks for you answers.
In the meanwhile I download the trial and check, but I am afraid to to have time to explore all the possibilities.
Regards.
Mau.
800 Pages is no problem, as long as you have multiple “files” for sections, chapters, etc.
I cannot think how you can have a “file” duplicated by some sort of pointer/link into other sections. Copy/Paste of course, but that duplicates which I don’t think you want. Perhaps others might have an idea.
Please do take the time to go through the Tutorial, experiment with a copy of your document, esp. how to compile without leaving to last minute. Read the FAQ’s on L&L’s web site, scan the manual to see what’s there, and perhaps read one of the books L&L lists on their web site.
You mention you are short of time. That might be a risk.
Thank you for your time.
Yes the manual is already split into manageable parts.
I understand that a novel writes does not need to “reuse” portions of the book into different places, so this feature may be hidden or not present at all.
My problem with time, is that in one month of free trial I may not become proficient enough to find the best solution to my problem.
That’s why I asked first.
Regards.
Years ago I led a project to produce a large technical document by a team of about a dozen “experts”. Prior to my appointment the team using the corporate’s standard word processor tool (Microsoft Word). Nothing wrong with Word but to make a big document with a big team – chaos.
We made a multi-user database (Access is what we had). The database held the text of the document along with fields in the record saying where in the final document that bit of text was supposed to go. Team members edited the database, not the document. Some records were repeatable and the database table that defined the final output document allowed repeats. It was a relatively simple program that generated the output document to styled HTML which we then published on the intranet and printed to PDF and paper.
To get a good impression how Scrivener handles huge documents I suggest you save your LibreOffice document (probably .odt) as .docx and use File/Import/Import and split… menu entry. I’m referring to the Mac version, so on Windows it might differ a bit.
If you had used proper headings with levels in that document you will get the proper structure of chapters and sub-chapters in Scrivener’s Binder.
It’s a bit hard to locate in the PDF of Help, and the notes are split across a page boundary, also not so nicely formatted, so here is what that says:
<$include>
<$include:textNameOrPath>
You can use the <$include…> placeholder to have text from an external
document inserted into the text during Compile. This can be useful if you have
text snippets that need repeating throughout for some reason.
To insert the main text of any document in the current project, either use the
<$include> tag and apply a document link to the whole tag that points to the
document whose text you wish to insert, or use <$include:docName>, where
“docName” is the name of the document you wish to be inserted. (Using
document links is the more reliable method.)
To insert the text of an external file, either use the <$include> tag with a link to the external file, or use <$include:docPath>, where “docPath” is either the full or relative path of the document whose text you wish to insert (relative paths should be relative to the folder in which the project is stored).
…Note that only plain text UTF-8 files and RTF files are supported, and only the text of such files will be included (images, footnotes and comments are ignored in external RTF files that are inserted in this manner).
The <$include…> tag is only supported in the following areas: the main text;
notes; title prefixes and suffixes; section layout prefixes and suffixes. You can
also use it in the ebook “Description” metadata field, but only if it appears on its own.
Thanks all for all the hints.
Unfortunately this:
“Note that only plain text UTF-8 files and RTF files are supported, and only the text of such files will be included (images, footnotes and comments are ignored in external RTF files that are inserted in this manner).”
is a show stopper. In our need the “external” file is a full fledged document possibly with the same styles and organization as the main book … just as any other book section/chapters only included more than once.
What looks strange to me is that work processors like Word or Libre office do have this feature since the origin, while it looks that practically no book editing software have it.
Anyway, again, thanks all for your help.
There is another alternative, one that provides far more power but requires more technical knowledge for a technical manual workflow. Scrivener supports Markdown outputs, and markdown engines can include files with a lot of flexibility. The workflow here would be to use post-processing to run a script that would first use Pandoc to convert your include files to markdown and then include them at the correct location. Pandoc would “knit” the documents together for final output to PDF or ODT or HTML etc whatever your deliverable is. This means you get the many benefits of Scrivener’s Binder and metadata to manage the writing and still handle complex documents. The cost: ability to use scripting and tools like Pandoc.
Note that if you include an internal file, from elsewhere in the current project, it can include the same elements that any Scrivener document can.
Is it possible to have an “internal” (or external for what matters) file, which is effectively another full scrivener book?
That whould be perfect, because it could allow infinite recursion … a book that contains another, that contains another … and so on
