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

Yes I’m coming to the same conclusion when it comes to a large writing project. I think I will continue using Scrivener for my major writing but I have found that Obsidian is excellent for my work project and meeting notes and for reviewing and linking my research for various presentations and the book project. In short, Obsidian is replacing Craft for project and meeting notes and will be used for thinking and idea generation and linking from articles and books that I read. I think I was trying to make Obsidian a Swiss Army knife, which isn’t ideal nor necessarily desirable.

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I started my first Cognitive Productivity book in Scrivener, but I found it a bit awkward. I wanted to keep my research notes/materials separate from my book (basically keeping the research wherever). I also found Leanpub quite appealing philosophically (and more).

So I exported all to plain text, and resumed writing in BBedit+ Markdown, using Leanpub to publish. It outputs PDF, epub and .mobi.

I wrote my entire second book in Markdown, using BBEdit and the Leanpub framework.

My 3rd book, Discontinuities: Love, Art, Mind is an edited one, in progress. Again written in Markdown (though some people have contributed chapters in Word, unfortunately).

I have no regret re markdown , Leanpub and my toolkit.

Leanpub does not preclude you from selling the same book elsewhere.

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@LucCogZest Great input, thanks. I’m exploring how best to write in Scrivener using markdown. Scrivener does support markdown so if I can do that successfully that may be what I decide to do. That said, I find it more appealing to use something like Obsidian, iA Writer etc. to write the book. The problem I’m running into is that it is harder to re-organize chapters in sections in those programs than it is in Scrivener. I’m finding myself needing to use a Johnny decimal type system unless I use Scrivener in which case I can manually move the chapters/sections around at will.

Have you run into any of the same types of issues?

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well, I certainly don’t want to dissuade anyone from using Scrivener. It’s great software with many benefits. (I believe there are also ways of using it with Leanpub now; but when I was finishing my first book its output didn’t work with Leanpub).

Leanpub generates the PDFs etc. and handles the autonumbering. It expects a book.txt file which is the outline of the book containing the names of the top level files in the book. Those files can have whatever structure one wants.

Leanpub computes the heading numbers and churns out a ToC. Just press the “preview” button on the internal Leanpub.com webpage for your book and Leanpub outputs the various files for review or publishing.

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I really liked Scrivener and used it for a while, but went off it when I tried to do my first long project. I found the lack of proper stylesheet-type management to be a big problem. It was a bit more of a technical document, I admit, and I appreciate that Scrivener is more designed for novels, but the ability to do create, manage and modify styles was definitely missing back then. Has it got any of that now?

At the time, trying to avoid Word and not being able to afford InDesign, I went for Nisus Writer, which did proper hierarchical style management and used very-compatible RTF; not as good as plain text, I grant you, but pretty good at the time.

That, for me, is still the major limitation of Markdown (which I use all the time for most other things): the ability to give paragraphs or spans of text a named style, which can be formatted later. I don’t think there are any dialects which support that?

I can’t really speak to Scrivener then vs now but the compile function (as I understand it) can apply style to specific headings up export. It seem a bit complicated to me. Ideally, I would prefer to just use a plain text editor to write the book I’m working on but I find it cumbersome to manage the chapters and sections. Scrivener at least makes this part easy! :slight_smile:

Yes, I think the limitation of Scrivener’s styling is that it only has a limited number of predefined styles.

I was helping a friend with a book that included lots of verses of poetry, for example, which needed at least one ‘poem verse’ style, ideally several, and a ‘poem title’ style, and these were distinct from anything else in the documents, but might need to be reformatted before publishing.

Sadly, I think the only plain-text system that can handle such things at present is LaTeX, but that’s far from being easy to read or write, and you have to be a programmer to get the most out of it. (I am, but I still avoid it. :slight_smile: )

I think the limitation of Scrivener’s styling is that it only has a limited number of predefined styles

No, in v3 you can create and style your own styles without limitation.

However, it’s entirely true that Scrivener is a rich text environment first and foremost. It has affordances for Markdown and understands it but it will not render it live like Bear, Craft, Ulysses and other editors.

(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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Ah - thanks, that’s good to know! I may revisit it when I come to write my first novel.

But I’m pleased to hear that things have improved a lot on this front since my experiences with v2. I may have a think about using it for other kinds of documents too.

(As they say, everybody has one novel inside them… and for most people, that’s exactly where it should stay. :slight_smile:)

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V3 is a lot more capable (and more logical) than V1 or 2, but they have added or rethought some basic workflows: e.g. the addition of ‘proper’ styles (instead of the former ‘formatting presets’), and the changes to the compilation workflow amongst others, so there are couple of things which can trip up people converting from earlier versions.

If you do decide to take it up again, then you’ll find that an hour with the Interactive Tutorial will save you a fair bit of time and angst. The tutorial has a collection pulling together all the features which are new or changed in V3, so it’s easy to review them.

HTH.

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