If I have to set up Scrivener to behave like a plain text editor in order to use MMD, why would I continue to use Scrivener rather than an actual text editor, say TextMate?
Why doesn’t the Scrivener ‘compile’ screen just grow a screen of options for MMD export, e.g. “insert additional carriage return between paragraphs”, “replace bold/italic with MMD markup”, “format blockquote paragraphs with >”
It’s hideous that I have to manually edit existing documents with all of the above. Error prone. Not everyone is starting with a blank project!
Basically today Scrivener got in the way of my writing by unloading this hurt onto me. Not. Good. Enough.
It’s probably not my place to answer here, I am a recent user and also a relatively light user of Scrivener. Not because I don’t like it a lot, for some other reasons that are irrelevant here. But if I had to answer to this I’d say:
Scrivener is a great tool for writing because it allows you to access your research sources easily and rationally, and creates no barriers to the activity of just writing. While it’s nice that you can use MMD with it, not everyone uses MMD when writing. That’s why. I think.
Well, there’s the rub. If you don’t start with MMD, it’s really really problematic if you later, want to use MMD. Actually I don’t care anything about MMD, what I want to do is submit my thesis in Latex/PDF, and Scrivener just doesn’t make this easy at all.
Because academic writing means I have to be super-careful about quotations, and in my case, translations (I have to translate the sources I use myself), this means I must apply a modicum of formatting, as well as footnoting, as I write. But when you do this in MMD, it’s great for a web page or a short document,but not so nice for something long form.
Frankly Scrivener ought to support output to Tex directly, not just through MMD. Or at least, allow an author to convert the Scrivener formatting to MMD markup on compile (Format -> Convert is one way).
I know people like to say “separate the text from its presentation” but this doesn’t mean that the functional description of the text doesn’t include things like “this is a block quote”, “this is a foreign language”, “this is a heading” and so on. Scrivener has primitive support for basic “styles” in the text and that’s all it needs - but it needs to know how to export those formats to ALL its output formats that includes MMD. Rather than forcing me to think in MMD and use Scrivener as a plain text editor. In that case I will just use a plain text editor or even bypass MMD and find a WYSIWYG Latex editor!
As a scholarly research database it’s not much chop - I have specialised programs for that - it’s a writing tool. And it is starting to let me down because I can’t get the document formats that I need to output without effectively starting over with the basic formatting.
Well, first of all you don’t have to do that. The manual does state that as a good route to take, mainly because some of the rich text conventions that are commonly used can cause confusions when working in a literal text. Things like first-line indents can make something look like a code-block when you forgot to use a tab, or a space between two paragraphs where there are none. So setting up the default formatting to be more literal with how it displays text can remove these confusions. It’s optional though, and one is free to make the text look as pretty as they like with MMD. What I myself like to use the rich text system for is annotation for my own benefit. Knowing that none of it will appear in the final copy, I’m free to use it how I like, so rather than feeling like I’m stuck in a word processor writing plain-text, I feel more like I’m in an environment fine-tuned for writing—but that’s probably in part because I use MMD to compose everything (even this post, with a BBCode output).
I think, if your question is, why would anyone use Scrivener to write what is essentially a non-formatted document, what you are really asking is: why would anyone use Scrivener to write any document. The formatting aspects of Scrivener are, I would say, not what draws people to the program (e-books, perhaps aside, as there aren’t many tools that do a good job of that without looking like a web site editor). There are plenty of tools out there that do formatting to a T, and are great a producing nice looking documents. LaTeX is one of those systems, word processors another. However most of these—when it comes to putting together a 500 page book with a plethora of background information—are really kind of awkward to use. TextMate for a 200k word book? Well, if that’s okay with you, then go right ahead, but I myself shudder at the thought.
Because these things are often more complicated to implement than it might seem. What is a blockquote paragraph? A specific measurement, or anything greater than 0.001”? What to do when the user applied a sloppy bold range that extends into the whitespace after word? These aren’t easy things to solve in a programming language. That doesn’t mean we don’t want to do them, it just means it takes time to get them right, and it’s not a super high priority thing because frankly, many people who use MultiMarkdown find the raw syntax to be a big part of the appeal—they prefer it to the appearance of rich text, and beyond that MMD use is but a small fraction of overall use. That doesn’t mean improving it isn’t important (in fact Keith and I have spent all week hammering out improvements to MMD for the next free release and I’ve probably spent several weeks beyond that making the job as easy as possible for him).
I’ll say in vague terms we have ideas for stuff like this, stuff that probably won’t materialise for some time to come as there are plenty of other things to do, but others might materialise earlier, the latter of which will not be a complete system, but at least more rich text to Markdown (and vice versa) support. Some things like tables and lists will be very difficult to do for other technical reasons with how they are implemented in the software.
There are some things already that can help bring a rich text document into the MMD world. Beyond physically adding spaces between paragraphs with a global search and replace ([b]Edit/Find/Project Replace[/b]), you can also turn on an option in the Transformations compile option pane that will translate paragraph spacing to physical spacing. You can also convert bold and italics to asterisks in the editor ([b]Format/Convert/Bold and Italics to Markdown Syntax[/b]). Those two functions right there alleviate what most of the burden will be. Footnotes are already handled automatically, as are inline images and annotations. Blockquotes need to be handled by hand, so that’s a little work, as would code blocks lists and tables.
But I think it would be important to stress that even if we did have a “rich text to MMD” approach that was solid and fully implemented, it would probably still require a fair amount of work to get an existing Word document up to spec with it. I’m not sure how that could be avoided, realistically, as we’re talking about a pretty big shift in program philosophy.
I’m not sure if I follow. If all you want to do is compose in LaTeX that is perfectly feasible, there are many who do just that. I myself prefer the more low-key MMD approach, even if that means a little clean-up afterward in the .tex file, but that’s up to taste. You can even automate some of the things that require manual labour, like heading levels, using the compiler’s title prefix and suffix fields, and code your own macros with Replacements.
But again, these authors who wish to work in LaTeX aren’t looking for WYSIWYG—I’m not even sure how that is possible with LaTeX, given that it is a typesetting engine that requires an often lengthy execution to produce a final result. The closest thing I know of is LyX, but that isn’t WYSIWYG, it’s not even close.
This really seems to be the crux of the problem. Like I say, most of the people I know that use MMD actually enjoy using MMD and prefer it to rulers and fonts and all that jazz.
And again, if the writing tools supplied by Scrivener aren’t the main draw for you, then I’m not sure what the draw is for you to Scrivener. If things like having a corkboard and integrated manuscript outline with the capability of breaking those 200k words down into manageable 500 word chunks isn’t appealing to you, if the vast organisation and meta-data control isn’t helping you, if non-linear access is of no purpose to you, and all you are looking for is something that will format your document for you—then you’re really in the same boat that some other people are in not using MMD, but rather a heavy word processor work flow, you’re just on another end of the spectrum with it. Some people can’t abide by the “this isn’t a word processor” thing, and don’t find the writing tools compelling enough to see any merit in Scrivener. And that’s fine, we all have different ways of working and no one software is going to work for everyone. In a way, Scrivener’s MMD support is a bit like its word processor support: it’ll get you 90% of the way there for demanding documents, higher for less demanding ones, but its primary focus is upon the 90% of the job that is composing text from scratch, not the 10% that is making that text look right (be it the code or the aesthetic appearance). Some people like that 90% so much they bring in their existing work in progress and convert it to the system. This often involves just as much if not more work as going from rich text to MMD, but that’s not the main function of the program, that’s more a teething problem with the software. Once you start using it for original composition or have your WIP fully “Scrivenerised”, that’s where the application philosophy blossoms. You say not everyone starts with a blank project, that’s true, but once you’ve been using the software for years that’s probably all you’ll ever start with. So it is, individually speaking, a diminishing problem—something you have to put some solid work in toward in month #1, but never again have to bother with in the five years of solid usage following. Like I say, a teething problem. We do our best to make that as minimal a problem as possible, but even someone coming from Word needs to spend a few good hours splitting up their document, assigning and cleaning out fixed titles, etc.
Whether you use MMD or word processors at that point is mostly just a matter of taste as the end result is, with a few exceptions and equivocations within overlapping areas, pretty close to one another. It’s really more the work ethic and process itself that draws people to one way of working or another, not the output (LaTeX is of course a huge exception; as are e-books in the inverse, right now).
I dont like the color yellow. I don’t see why anyone else would ever wear, use, or consume anything yellow. To me it makes no sense at all.
I recommend that you take the same approach that I use for things that are yellow.
Don’t use things you don’t like. Then simply let those that do like those thing things alone.
You don’t like MMD. So don’t use MMD.
You don’t like what you think scrivener is. So don’t use scrivener.
Problem solved.
To answer the one thing that you actually seem to ask:
Scrivener brings free form draft segment association. This allows for rapid reorganization of your text. 2. Since scrivener abandons all but the rudimentary formatting during drafting, the seeming non-tradiation foot notes and annotations FOLLOW the reorganization without any need for the author to manage the FN/AN content.
Since the finalization of your draft left till the compile run, the setup of the drafting environment is exclusively for the comfort of the author, not the output of the document. All aspect of formatting can be set in compile setting and the actual display formatting ignored IF YOU CHOOSE.
Since the final output from scrivener is your draft you can used external tools such as MMD, LaTEX, InDesign, Word, etc to provide the final layout for your document in the formate you need.
As I stated earlier, feel free to not use scrivener if you don’t like the way it works.
Yes it does say that. But if you take the point of view that using styles to delineate structural semantics, which is what Scrivener does (body-text, heading, title, block-quote, these are all built into it), and what HTML is (
,
,
are all structurally semantic syntax markers) … and it’s almost the way that MMD works!
It’s not OK to say that, if you follow the scrivener way, i.e. to use the supplied program’s standard features, then an entire export format is lost to you.
I don’t want free from “annotation” because such things are called research notes. I put them into Scrivener. But when I’m actually writing chapters, I have no need of annotation, apart from footnotes and citations, because that’s the only acceptable form of annotation.
I do not want to use Scrivener to format documents. I want to use LaTeX to format the document.
But what I have already done, is use the basic formatting options of Scrivener to give my document semantic shape, i.e. mark off quotes blocks, foreign language elements, insert footnotes. But what I’m interested in is not not the “format”, but the semantic markup - MMD is one system to do this, LaTeX another, XHTML yet another … and so is the internal stylesheet system of Scrivener.
A paragraph that’s been selected to have the inbuilt block quote Scrivener style. That’s a semantic instruction to Scrivener. Just like ‘
’ is a semantic descriptor of a piece of HTML text … or one that in MMD is prefixed with >. Nothing to do with 0.001 inches. The formatter deals with what that looks like.
Seriously? The Scrivener export compiler doesn’t know if a paragraph has a nominated style applied to it, and can’t transform a single carriage return into two?
Look, the problem here for me isn’t that I can’t use MMD format. The problem is I’ve been busily formatting my document using the built in Scrivener methods only to after the fact find out I can’t get into shape for MMD compile without an intensive effort to re-format the semantic formatting all over again (and potentially disastrous if I miss something).
I don’t know what Word has to do with it.
I would simply like the really basic WYSIWYG formatting that’s already applied in the documents I’ve already created to be able to exported into LaTeX so that I can output it as a really bitchin’ PDF, instead of having to go via RTF/Word formats which ends up producing PDFs that don’t look so good.
Of course my choices are invalid. That explains everything.
N.B. I don’t use “rulers” or “fonts”. I use the built in styles to give semantic shape to the document. I am really quite anal about that. So please stop thinking I’ve sat there and selected text and formatted it 24 point Helvetica bold. I never do that. I structurally describe my documents (i.e. a heading, a block quote). Now that I have, Scrivener won’t let me get into LaTeX, without reduplicating that effort all over again, a manual and potentially error prone process.
I note that I don’t have to re-enter all my footnotes in the MMD style - Scrivener will export those into MMD format just great. Why’s that? Why can’t it do the same with paragraphs and the four or five basic built-in styles?
I don’t want to use MMD because I don’t care about it. What I care about, is being able output my document into LaTeX - for which I’m forced to use MMD.
When everything that need to do to structurally describe my document is already done.
I get there’s heaps of MMD fans about, I’m not one of them. The tool is forcing me to that choice, to get to my ultimate destination. It’s either that or export to RTF and edit in Word. If it’s a first draft tool, which it is, it really ought to support more editable output formats than RTF, and Word. Because, get this, Word sucks.
I agree with you relative to Word. The reasons is sucks are numerous. “Legion” may be a better numerical starting point if we want to enumerate them.
If you want to format with latex, then do so. If the things that scrivener brings to the table don’t appeal to you then use something other than scrivener. If you find the output formats of scrivener limiting then don’t use scrivener. What you really seem to be saying is that you don’t want to use scrivener. So don’t use scrivener.
I will say that if you search the forums here there are numerous folks using scrivener for academia (I’m sure there other fields, but I can’t think of any posts from non-accedemics off the top of my head). Consider asking one of those folks for some best practices.
Scrivener is a fundamental shit in workflow for many folks. scrivener focuses on the creation of the content matter not the content presentation. Effectively, scrivener is NOT a word processor in the traditional sense of WYSIWYG. If you think of it as “vi on steroids” or a programming IDE then you will be closer to the concept. The other analogy is that of a traditional office (physical) project space with separate areas for collateral organization, draft concepts, miscellaneous details and random related information. Scrivener is focused on the organization and creation of your project, not the final output.
As I said, I do know that folks use latex with scrivener. Hopefully they can help. You may want to consider a post titled in a way to get thier attention though. Maybe something like “Need tips on how to best use LaTEX with Scrivener”.
The problem is I’ve already used Scrivener. If I was starting over I’d just use the MMD format and be done with it. However, all my text is in Scriv already and I can’t get it out the way I’d like to.
I’m currently looking at rtf2latex … export to RTF then use that tool to convert it to LaTeX. That might do the trick.
Actually, it doesn’t do that, at least not I don’t think in the way you are thinking. It’s purely rich text. It has no stylesheet system and no semantic ranging (save for a few things like inline footnotes—which MMD can use, as you note). That’s precisely the problem. It’s all just raw font and ruler codes in the document, there isn’t anything to reliably deduce semantic structure out of.
Like I said we’re working on the simpler stuff, what can be guessed, like a range of text that has had its Italic or Oblique font variant selected—we can reasonably assume the author wished to emphasise that range and apply a single-asterisk emphasis to it. But an 18pt bold line? What does that mean? It could be anything. You might call it a fourth level header, but we would have no way of knowing that.
I wasn’t suggesting you adopt my working methods, merely pointing out that if you so please, you don’t have to make the text editor look like BBEdit with 9pt Monoco.
So, at any rate, I understand your original gripe now, because you’ve been operating under the assumption that Scrivener is a semantic editor and of course, it if was, you’d have absolutely every right to gripe because it wouldn’t make any sense at all to have a fully semantic architecture and then just not support MMD (even if transparently, so as to provide support directly to LaTeX) with it! Unfortunately that’s not the case. It uses the Apple text engine, which shaved about a year and a half of development off of it, but means the formatting engine itself is pretty simple.
Right now, if you do want semantic output, then you can either use a semantic marking system (like MMD, or Pandoc, or even XML or LaTeX) in the editor.
I’m sorry you got the wrong impression about the rich text tools being semantic. I’m not sure where you came across that information, but the manual definitely goes out of its way to make it clear that presets are not styles. They are one-shot formatting macros. Once you use them, the text you applied them to is altered to the macro and that’s it. There is no way for the engine to even know it once came from “Blockquote”. If you change the preset later on, nothing will happen to all of those ranges of text you altered with it.
Nothing is forcing you to use it. It’s one set of compile options that make integration easier for people that write in the MMD system. You can produce any kind of structural document in Scrivener via the plain-text compile output method, and like I said you can even get a bit fancy with it as well. Those that use Scrivener to compose LaTeX (without MMD!) like to establish prefix/suffix settings like “\chapter{” and “}
\label{<$title_no_spaces>}” which inserts the name of the folder and wraps in in LaTeX code for output. Now they don’t have to bother with that detail and get on with writing. If you were using Scrivener to write XML or HTML documents you could do something very similar. You aren’t forced to use anything, but if you want a semantic document you shouldn’t be using the RTF system. Where to go from there is your choice.
Yeah, if you’re already done with the project, that might not be a bad route to take. It won’t be a pretty .tex file, and might require some debugging, but it’s probably easier than converting to MMD at this point.
Ioa has provided some other answers. I would check with the latex crowd as they may have ideas on this as well. Someone else may have solved this already.
I think a general post in the non-MMD with a “LaTEX” subject would help you get the answers you need.
