4 ms·
If anyone is looking for a paid product, Scriviner has been amazing for my novel writing productivity. You can sync your smart phone version to your desktop ver
by the_lonely_road 5y ago
If anyone is looking for a paid product, Scriviner has been amazing for my novel writing productivity. You can sync your smart phone version to your desktop version using Dropbox. It gives you Jira level power over how your organize your project and has really easy export functionality that turns your writing into all kinds of industry standard sizing and layouts.
I know it sounds like I'm affiliated based on that gushing review but I am not, just a really happy writer that finally found a good tool and wanted to share!
- brtkdotse 5y ago> It gives you Jira level power I’d rethink this analogy for the HN crowd
- weedfroglozenge 5y agoWorking on CPTR-045
- nathell 5y agoAt least it’s not COVID-19
- notjustanymike 5y agoI suspect you meant: Loading CPTR-045 Loading CPTR-045 Loading CPTR-045 Loading CPTR-045
- kayodelycaon 5y agoI think it's pretty apt. Scrivener is a large, configurable application. The only real difference in the analogy is stock Scrivener is easier to navigate and nicer to use than stock JIRA.
- gentleman11 5y agoI think they were saying that hn crowd tends to dislike jira
- Otek 5y agoWell, it’s slow an unintuitive in many aspects but I don’t think anyone will deny that Jira is a powerful tool
- contravariant 5y agoOut of interest what kind of file format does Scriviner use? Is it vaguely human readable or some kind of proprietary blob?
- thebooktocome 5y agoProprietary with exports to markdown, PDF, RTF, plain text, etc.
- staticman2 5y agoIf I recall correctly a Scriviner file is actually a nested collection of rich text format (.rtf) files with a indexing file.
- kayodelycaon 5y agoThe Mac version is actually a package. (folder pretending to be a file; OS-level feature) The text files are RTF. It uses xml for some metadata. But the structure is a byzantine nest of folders with uuid (or hash, can’t remember) names. It’s effectively proprietary but if you’re desperate, you can retrieve all of the individual files as they are standard formats.
- canadianfella 5y ago> Jira level power No thanks
- flenserboy 5y agoI know plenty of writers who are fond of Scrivener. My personal choice for a paid product (as I use a Mac) is Ulysses — going back and forth between the Mac & iOS versions is painless, and its bare-bones, grouped-file interface fits right with my workflow. Export options are plentiful, and it pairs well with Pandoc. Both are good.
- kayodelycaon 5y agoNote for those interested: * Ulysses is plain text markdown. * Scrivener uses RTF. (There is markdown support but iirc it's on top of rich text, not in place of it.) :)
- crooked-v 5y agoUlysses is "sorta Markdown". There are a bunch of fiddly proprietary differences from "real Markdown" that get in the way of things like being able to cleanly copy-paste material across, especially the second you touch images or other media (which are just magic placeholders in the Ulysses UI rather than properly handled Markdown text).
- browningstreet 5y agoI tried using Ulysses with Leanpub and it wasn't compatible - it adds blank markdown here and there and breaks the Leanpub rendering process. Couldn't get either Leanpub or Ulysses to fix it, and it was a known problem. That said, Ulysses is a nice editor, as long as that behavior doesn't cause issues.
- melling 5y agoWhat are people using to write non-fiction (e.g technical books)? Much of what Scriviner provides is also useful?
- filleduchaos 5y agoScrivener explicitly targets non-fiction writers as well. There are template projects for essays, papers and proposals, with support for LaTeX as well as various citation styles (I recall at least APA and MLA). The notes and research sections of the project are even more useful for non-fiction writing in my opinion. For programming books especially I recall Scrivener 3 added basic support for code blocks. No syntax highlighting, but if you export to HTML or LaTeX you can use a library or package for that.
- jabroni_salad 5y agoMadcap Flare is pretty popular in the technical writer sphere.
- IncRnd 5y agoI've used Scrivener for a few years, too. Prior to Scrivener I used text files with lots of back end work. When the day came for me to switch I looked at both Ulysses and Scrivener. Today, in retrospect I am extremely happy that I chose Scrivener, since it has treated me so kindly! Recently, Vellum was recommended to me. Vellum looks very good, and I will test it on my next work.
- cstross 5y agoCan confirm: have used Scrivener more or less exclusively for books since 2008, in which time I've written and sold about 15 novels. Scriv is a bit gnarly and bloated these days -- feature creep is a thing! -- but it still makes refactoring complex compound documents with multiple narrative threads vastly easier than any mere word processor. (Best analogy for developers: if Microsoft Word is a text editor, then Scrivener is an IDE. Project oriented, multiple sub-documents, tracks metadata relating to subdocument state, allows tagging and searching, and it's an editor on top.)