4 ms·

I dropped Scrivener for LaTeX and have never been happier. Obviously, Word is a bad choice - it's not really built for publishing - but I do like the long form

by trhr 4y ago

I dropped Scrivener for LaTeX and have never been happier. Obviously, Word is a bad choice - it's not really built for publishing - but I do like the long form single-file approach. I use LaTeX's ability to write comments as a way to archive old chunks of text, leave margin notes, separate scenes for easy cut/paste, etc. My main problem with Scrivener is that my scenes tend to be short - many under 400 words - and it just gets unwieldy to have a couple hundred of these.

contravariant 4y ago
I've not used Scrivener myself but as I've heard it described it is as a tool to organise chapters / parts of a book and sort out their relations, how are you using LaTeX for that? I definitely like how your approach keeps everything in a human readable file, I never liked the way Scrivener uses an opaque format which doesn't play nice with any other tool you might use (I would much prefer a tool that annotated scenes in org-files or (pandoc) markdown).
- everybodyknows 4y ago
  I put together a set of Org-mode key bindings, config variables (file-local) and tag color codes for a screenplay project. Org-mode's HTML output was way off from what I wanted, so I hacked up a CLI filter, in a language I know better than Elisp. From HTML it's easy to get to PDF, an industry-standard format.
- trhr 4y ago
  > I've not used Scrivener myself but as I've heard it described it is as a tool to organise chapters / parts of a book and sort out their relations, how are you using LaTeX for that? It doesn't really do that though. It's not a relational database. You can't say, create a MainCharacterProfile document that then gets "attached" to certain scenes. The closest you can get is manually typing out "characters in this scene" and then manually hyperlinking to that document. Which won't update automatically if you were to remove that character from the scene. It's kind of a mess to use it like the marketing says you should. If it was relational, that'd be fuckin' dope. It's best to think about it as a combination of a filing cabinet, a typewriter, and a cork board. You can manually sort your filing cabinet, rearranging your scenes by page or by folder. You can type up new scenes and edit old ones. You can drag and drop things on your cork board. You can add labels and colored flags for filtering and sorting. But that's functionally it. The only things it writes to disk are rtf docs. No library or structured metadata or anything; just more rtf docs. It's honestly closer to "wordpad with tabs and folders" than anything else. I've been doing NaNoWriMo on most years since ~2011, and I think it's total garbage. Plus my editor always wants a word doc, so revisions after the draft just happen in Word anyway. I think there's a good chance I could convince them to read a LaTeX document though, maybe even teach them how to add comments. As a bonus, the word document that scrivener generates doesn't have all of my background and notes, but the LaTeX doc has them right in-line as comments, so I think the feedback would be more constructive in a lot of places.
  - contravariant 4y ago
    Huh, interesting. I do know someone who is quite happy to use Scrivener, so if it works it works I guess, but it seems to do way less than I thought it would. At this point something like org-mode or markdown sounds more useful. At the very least you could annotate scenes with metadata and read this metadata using other programs. Should be reasonably doable to tag scenes with the characters in it etc. From what I know of org-mode it could do quite some magic with just that info. I reckon LaTeX is also a good choice, though it's tricky for other tools to read, you'd basically always need to compile it first, or stick to simple LaTeX.

by trhr 4y ago

contravariant 4y ago

I've not used Scrivener myself but as I've heard it described it is as a tool to organise chapters / parts of a book and sort out their relations, how are you using LaTeX for that? I definitely like how your approach keeps everything in a human readable file, I never liked the way Scrivener uses an opaque format which doesn't play nice with any other tool you might use (I would much prefer a tool that annotated scenes in org-files or (pandoc) markdown).

everybodyknows 4y ago
I put together a set of Org-mode key bindings, config variables (file-local) and tag color codes for a screenplay project. Org-mode's HTML output was way off from what I wanted, so I hacked up a CLI filter, in a language I know better than Elisp. From HTML it's easy to get to PDF, an industry-standard format.
trhr 4y ago
> I've not used Scrivener myself but as I've heard it described it is as a tool to organise chapters / parts of a book and sort out their relations, how are you using LaTeX for that? It doesn't really do that though. It's not a relational database. You can't say, create a MainCharacterProfile document that then gets "attached" to certain scenes. The closest you can get is manually typing out "characters in this scene" and then manually hyperlinking to that document. Which won't update automatically if you were to remove that character from the scene. It's kind of a mess to use it like the marketing says you should. If it was relational, that'd be fuckin' dope. It's best to think about it as a combination of a filing cabinet, a typewriter, and a cork board. You can manually sort your filing cabinet, rearranging your scenes by page or by folder. You can type up new scenes and edit old ones. You can drag and drop things on your cork board. You can add labels and colored flags for filtering and sorting. But that's functionally it. The only things it writes to disk are rtf docs. No library or structured metadata or anything; just more rtf docs. It's honestly closer to "wordpad with tabs and folders" than anything else. I've been doing NaNoWriMo on most years since ~2011, and I think it's total garbage. Plus my editor always wants a word doc, so revisions after the draft just happen in Word anyway. I think there's a good chance I could convince them to read a LaTeX document though, maybe even teach them how to add comments. As a bonus, the word document that scrivener generates doesn't have all of my background and notes, but the LaTeX doc has them right in-line as comments, so I think the feedback would be more constructive in a lot of places.
- contravariant 4y ago
  Huh, interesting. I do know someone who is quite happy to use Scrivener, so if it works it works I guess, but it seems to do way less than I thought it would. At this point something like org-mode or markdown sounds more useful. At the very least you could annotate scenes with metadata and read this metadata using other programs. Should be reasonably doable to tag scenes with the characters in it etc. From what I know of org-mode it could do quite some magic with just that info. I reckon LaTeX is also a good choice, though it's tricky for other tools to read, you'd basically always need to compile it first, or stick to simple LaTeX.