Ioa – can you pls summarize/point us to the summary of what’s new regarding the MMD workflow?
Very briefly, and off the top of my head:
- Inline images will now be exported as MMD syntax, and those images will be extracted and placed into the compile folder so that they remain linked. To provide an inline image with a caption, put a quoted caption on the same line after the image. Example,
[b][Image.png] "Caption"[/b]. This will produce, in compile:[b][/b] - Annotations are now fully adaptive and will not produce HTML syntax errors. If you put carriage returns inside an embedded annotation (one that exists within a paragraph), Scrivener will format it with a
[b]<br/>[/b]for every carriage return. However, if the annotation exists on its own paragraph, instead of using SPAN for the annotation container, it will use DIV. You will need to be aware of this in any custom XSLTs that specifically look for span.annotation matching. The correct form should now be to look for any element with the .annotation class. All of MMD’s built-in XSLTs already work this way. DIV style annotations are fully MMD compatible. Feel free to use complex MMD inside of them. They are thus great as syntax-expansion tools, when coupled with a custom XSLT. All linked inspector comments use SPAN form because there is no such thing as a non-embedded linked comment. - Inspector footnotes will get a separate footnote ID suffix. Inline footnotes remain identified by “fn#”, but inspector footnotes get “cf#”. This makes no different to any legacy XSLTs because they don’t care what the ID is. However if desired, you could use this feature to create multiple note streams based on the ID prefix that Scrivener emits.
- In the Formatting pane of compiler, you can use the title suffix and prefix to add material within the headers—or optionally you can set the suffix and/or prefix to place extra material outside of the header line.
- Scrivener 2.0 uses the new MMD system calls. This won’t make a huge difference in actual usage as the default MMD installation has symbolic links to the old system calls for backward compatibility. It might be an issue in customised installs though. This also means old MMD bugs have been fixed, and some new things need to be read-up on if you haven’t updated MMD in a long while. There were some significant changes to MMD in the time between 1.54 and 2.0.
- Separators panel has some MMD specific output choices. In LaTeX mode, “Page break” will inserted the LaTeX code for a page break. In regular MMD and XHTML, this will use sequence of hyphens which get converted into an HR.
- Preserve formatting blocks, ordinarily used by RTF users to protect formatting from the compiler, can be used by MMD users to create code blocks. Wrapping a paragraph in this will cause tabs to be inserted in front of every line automatically. This has no impact at the sub-paragraph level.
- The automatic CSS has been removed as it no longer has any meaning. The way the new compiler works, there is no formatting possible with any of the plain-text based formats. Plus, this got in the way for most users.
- Meta-data has been moved to the compiler, it is no longer in the File menu. Also, you can create a file named “Meta-data” in the binder. If it is the first document that is compiled, Scrivener will append that to the MMD file’s meta-data block, making it easy to export multiple smaller documents with different meta-data from a single project. This is appended to the main compiler meta-data. So you can produce overrides in this file.
- Lots of options in compile have been tuned for MMD. Just go through the panes to see what you can do.
I don’t know if this is just my particular set up, but when I compile MMD --> LaTeX with linked images I get a package rather than the previous folder with the .tex and images. When this first happened I was baffled for an hour (it was a Friday afternoon …) before I worked out that I needed to view the package contents to find the .tex file.
Subsequently (as always) I looked through the documentation, but didn’t see anything about this.
(also, on p227 of the manual there is a cracking example of the MMD double footnote table bug.)
That doesn’t sound right; when I compile with linked images, I get the intended result: same as with RTF, the images are captured as-is and moved to the correct compilation folder. It is very rare for modern Mac applications to set any sort of bit that will turn something into a bundle. These days, that is all handled by the Finder in realtime. If the extension matches a type that is a known package format, then that is how it will be displayed in the Finder. Have you tried compiling anything else to LaTeX that doesn’t contain linked images, and if so is the result different? I wonder if you have perhaps installed some tool for LaTeX files on your system that is causing this to happen.
And yes, I love that double-footnote bug. It’s actually, if I recall, a bug in LaTeX (or probably more accurately in Memoir with tables). I’ll have to check again, but I think I remember checking that to make sure there was only one \footnote call, and there was.