Discovering the Power of Plain Text w/ MD and Links for book project

Cool Workflows
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(I’m sure you know this, but in case people are new to Scrivener, or want to know what it can do…)

There’s actually little need to write in markdown in Scrivener, unless you are syncing documents with External Folder Sync, even if your final document will be in markdown format…

That’s because the conversion from RTF syntax is good enough for all but advanced needs. When you know that any combination of headings, italics, bold, footnotes, tables, footnotes, images, captions, cross-references will be translated from their RTF format to standard multi markdown on compilation, there’s not so much need to type *italic* or for

| Messing | around | with | pipes | to create | tables |

Scrivener’s User Manual (a far more complex document than most of use will ever use Scrivener for…) uses this sort of hybrid approach:

  • headings come from the Binder titles (i.e. they’re not markdown)
  • bold/italic are in markdown format
  • bullet / numbered lists, tables, internal and external links are all in Scrivener’s own format
  • Scrivener styles are used to identify Mac-only or Windows-only text, and the appropriate wording is selected on compilation…
  • latex commands are embedded in a style, which on compilation adds the necessary latex syntax.
...wherever you see blue text in this project, the compiler will insert the following code around the text:

	`\interface{`{=latex}blue text`}`{=latex}

Compilation itself uses a customised workflow as a front end via markdown to Latex to PDF, which results in the 800 page PDF manual being produced in either a Windows or Mac format, to taste.

If anyone’s interested in just how sophisticated Scrivener can be with regard to markdown and LaTeX, then it’s worth downloading the actual Scrivener project for the Manual from this page: User Manuals | Literature & Latte (select ‘Mac / Scriv Proj / Zip’ from the drop down list).

But the bottom line, is that you don’t actually have to write in markdown in Scrivener to produce multi-markdown. You can if you want, but it’s happy to mix and match.

Hope this is interesting to someone :grinning:…

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