Working with Pandoc to create list of figures and tables?

Scrivener
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Hi, I would like to create a list of figures and tables in my document. I know how to cross-reference figure and table numbers, and I’m also aware that Scrivener doesn’t allow referencing page numbers like that, as it only allows referencing page numbers from linked documents.

However, I’ve been searching these forums and found that people are using other tools like Pandoc to expand on Scrivener’s capabilities.

What I want to know is if it is possible to use Pandoc (or another tool) in Scrivener to cross-reference figures and tables to create comprehensive lists. And how much work do I have to put into learning such a process as that, not being code-savvy myself? I’m in the middle of writing my PhD thesis in Scrivener, and I’m considering whether I should invest time into learning this or if I should just fix it afterwards in Word.

Many thanks for any help!

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How close are you to finishing your PhD… do you have a deadline? Learning Pandoc/Quarto/Typst/… and converting everything if you are nearing completion might be more time consuming than making your lists of figures and tables in Word if you are familiar with that.

:slight_smile:
Mark

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Pretty close to the end, as I have to deliver the whole of its first draft to my supervisor next month… but I haven’t put figures or tables into the thesis’ main body of text yet. It will have a whole lot of figures though, and I’m not looking forward at the prospect of putting it all in Word a posteriori.

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If that’s the case, in your position, I’d probably grit my teeth and do it in Word,

I’ve been doing a lot of stuff in Typst (in their excellent web app for the moment), which could probably do all you want. I am not a coder and was in the humanities (albeit linguistics and translation), but I have found it pretty approachable, but you’d still have to take time getting to grips with it. Tables are pretty straightforward; I don’t know about figures… leave alone the sort of figures that you use.

If you want to try it, @nontroppo set up Scrivener templates for Pandoc –> Typst, and another for pure Typst. Check this thread:

And come back here for further help/advice!

:slight_smile:
Mark

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I second that recommendation to prepare it in Word (either manually or via its tools).

For the record, Pandoc and Quarto can do Table of Contents, Table of Figures, and Table of Tables, as well as an Index. But I would not mess with this right now.

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Good luck!!! Word is utterly and absolutely awful with lots of figures. Advice: do NOT use any figure wrapping if you can, always put figures inline. As figure counts increase Word’s placement starts to go batsh@t insane. I recently had to fight with a colleagues grant application, and when one figure looks OK, the others jump between pages, into margins, transdimensional nooks etc.[1] In the end I used LibreOffice and things were much better, a tool very worth considering as it supports DOCX yet somehow seems to do many things better (but I’m sure with its own caveats and limitations).

  1. And yes, I always visualise placement anchors so I know where the image is anchored to, but even with anchoring controlled for Word just cannot work properly, a bug that has plagued it since I started using it decades ago to the present. ↩︎

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Thanks for your advice! I’m also in the humanities, so your recommendation of Typst sounds particularly nice. How would you compare it to Pandoc, particularly in terms of learning curve? I’ll probably be using Scrivener in the future for papers and whatnot anyway, so eventually I will start learning this stuff.

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Thank you too for your advice! That’s good to know, since I’ll probably get my hands dirty with these tools in the future.

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Oof I was kind of hoping to get your attention; you’re such a legend in this community! I’ve been skimming through your guides every now and then, and felt like I would definitely need some more time learning the ropes of either Pandoc, Quatro or even Typst, as another fellow wrote about in a comment here. I did convert from Zotero to Bookends after reading some of your advice here, and it’s been awesome having “dynamic” citations in Scrivener.

Thank you very much for all the help you give around here, and for your advice about Word too. I get irritated almost as soon as I open it, so I definitely feel what you’re saying. If my university provided a LaTeX template I would be doing that from the beginning, but alas I’m stuck with what I’ve got for the moment. I will take a note about using LibreOffice instead of Word. I used it for a couple of years in the past, so I’m not unfamiliar to it. Thanks again!

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A bit of history:

I am long retired, but have been a Scrivener user since 2007. I gave up Word at version 6! Nisus Writer (Pro)[1] has been my word processor of choice for the last 20+ years; it is a great partner to Scrivener as its file format is RTF… it is built on the same Apple TextKit with extensive modifications, including a powerful macro language.

I realised that essentially I was using styles in Scrivener as a kind of markup, which I converted into final formatting in Nisus with a macro. At the same time I began exploring using markdown in Scrivener, particularly to output bare HTML that I could paste into the editor of a website.

I wanted something to challenge me mentally, so I was just beginning to look into using Pandoc or Quarto—LaTeX felt like too much to take on—when @nontroppo posted the thread about Typst, which seemed much more approachable. What struck me was that I could understand the Typst syntax for tables, for instance, much more easily than that in Pandoc (therefore Quarto), which was why I quickly concentrated on Typst.

Long story short, after trying for a while to produce what I wanted through the template @nontroppo posted, I thought it would be a good idea to try the Typst web app as a way of learning it, so I have been doing just that and converting some of my stuff there. The forum-users have been very helpful, and although I find much of the discussions somewhat impenetrable—most users seem to be mathematicians or computer scientists—I have been able to produce complex layouts, including margin-notes and other notes, footnotes, dynamic headers, etc.

The downside of Typst, in its current version, from your point of view is that it can only output PDF, or HTML using the CLI—they are in the process of developing HTML output on the web app. As you need .docx—it seems—that will mean Pandoc or Quarto, certainly for the time being.

:slight_smile:
Mark

[1] Sadly, no one is maintaining NWP any more, and the forum keeps returning “Bad gateway”; in spite of which it seems that you can still download and purchase it, which is very much off to my mind. So I can no longer recommend NWP to anyone!

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SOOOOOOOOOOOO TRUE! :rofl:

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I think Zotero is fine, but as far as workflow and flexibility, Bookends rocks.

Right this is something that does take time to get used too, and something to not play with anywhere near any deadline :rofl:

@xiamenese is awesome as he has shared his learning journey with typst, his mindset of a perpetual student is sage wisdom we can all take inspiration from! :heart_eyes:

Feel free to reach out here or PM if you need any advice once your deadlines are met. I would start by moving your Scrivener workflow to Pandoc, using Scrivener’s built-in features wherever you can. Pandoc can export to DOCX/HTML/Typst/LaTeX and by tweaking the existing templates you get a gentle introduction to the syntax of each without having to hard-commit to any. The steps to switch to Pandoc are also the steps of a “pure” TeX/Typst workflow, in fact my Typst template has both a pandoc>typst and pure typst compile format, the documents in scrivener themselves remain identical. This is the philosophical foundation, where content and its presentation are fully disconnected from each other, and the compiler will add the semantic boxes that presentation will affect as a PDF/EPUB/ODT/DOCX is being rendered.

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