I got through five years of college never having to type a paper. I begged.
“Ok, just so long as I can read it.”
“Oh I have great handwriting”.
When I tried the type something up, it was a mess. There were few personal computers. Now I type with one hand. LOL!!
I would use Scrivener.
If you want to use Latex: Texpad; It’s a Mac native Latex app and it works great.
Scrivener, but beware of the time you will spend getting everything into the right format if your guidelines don’t follow some international standard. (Like in my country).
I started my dissertation in Scrivener and then switched to Ulysses, wrote distraction free in markdown and formated everything in Pages.
Thanks for the additional input!
@shandy I’m pretty constrained by my Uni, so would be afraid moving from draft in NWP to final in LaTeX or Word would be a challenge.
@Katie glutton for punishment I hope some of the one-hand keyboard layouts have helped.
@johnkree yes, Texpad is what I’ve settled on. It’s familiar territory, and TeX has been around 40 years, so plenty of tools and shared knowledge on the 'net, including from @DrJJWMac here on the forum, which was very helpful.
I’ll see if I can find some keyboards like that. THANKS!
Worth noting that NWP does a robust export-to-Word.
You’re welcome.
I was referring to the layouts I linked to a while back.
But there are physical keyboards specialized for one-hand operation available too. They seem a bit pricey, so special layout on a two-hand keyboard might be a good option.
https://www.beeraider.com/one-handed-keyboard/
Awesome! I had no idea but it makes sense logically that some people are typing with one hand by necessity. Actually I am trying to teach myself to type but I type so slow! I can type reasonably well for being a person who didnt want to take typing because you can’t sleep in a typing class.
However, I tried to do nanowrimo (?) this last year and I couldn’t because my hand was killing me.
Thanks!
They are all three dimensional. Akin to the chess boards that would occasionally show up on the original Star Trek. Or the keyboard stack that Rick Wakeman used at the Yes concert I attended in Pittsburgh back in the 70’s.
–
JJW
+1 for NWP as a finishing tool for Scrivener.
That’s two of us!
20
I’ve made the first of two videos – one showing how I set up my templates in Word and Scrivener to work together. The second shows how I handle the edit process. I’m jammed up getting ready for a trial to start in a few weeks, but will get his done “soon.”
Scrivener or maybe with fiddling Obsidian
I’ve always done my NaNo Novels in Scrivener but I’m going to try it in Obsidian this year. However, for a final output that has to be exact (like a dissertation) I’m betting Scrivener would be better. My NaNo novels don’t get published and most never see other eyes than mine so I don’t care about more than the creation of them. For my needs Obsidian will probably work just fine.
I’m possibly an outlier considering the size of my final thesis – and how Word has options to write in different documents/files, albeit that they are connected into a single “Master” – but I too found Word unstable for all but the smallest of final changes…
I had several “save now” prompts/reminders/actions set up through KM, and was always very careful and meticulous on saving multiple versions before making significant changes. And keep in mind, where “styles” are used, changing a mere indent here, or a paragraph spacing there – that needs to be rolled out over hundreds of pages, is a significant change inside Word…
So whilst I had to use it given the preference of my supervisor – it was with eyes wide open in terms of stability, and the possibility of data loss.
If I had to do it all over again today, I would go back to Scrivener < > Bookends < > Devonthink, without question or hesitation.
Scrivener was an absolute rock, and its snapshot feature that allowed me to go back to earlier iterations of wording, sometimes typed months before (in the cold, dark hours of the morning! 
), saved me more times than I care to remember… And I still only used a few of its essential core features.
Yes, the export settings were a bit of a pain to set up – but once tweaked correctly, it was very much set-and-forget. And the forum was a lifesaver as well, with many always willing to guide/assist/suggest.
That all said, if I were to convey a ever-present criticism of using Scrivener (albeit one very much individually based) – it would be that the word-count/“pages” in Scrivener, never translated properly into number of pages in Word, at least – not in terms of my mental model. Half the reason my thesis was so large (overly broad topic issues aside), is that the writing in Scrivener was (for me) always disassociated with the number of pages an exported document would end up being. I would look at a chunk/Scrivening, and think it would be 2/3 pages max, but exported – with many detailed footnotes – it would translate into 10 pages over on Word… And it was the latter that counted.
The result was that I was regularly exporting, reviewing and re-reading what was being written over in Word, just to get a sense of how large a chapter/section would finally be. Which was not necessarily a bad thing – but is something to keep in mind. Scrivener is an amazing platform – but just remember that it is the final, exported product (usually through Word/into an A4(?) sized document) that counts, at the end of the day.
Is there a reason, why almost nobody of those who had posted so far is using Ulysses for that?
I too have that question. Is Ulysses a viable option?
Why not?
Ulysses “speaks” La Tex, and could handle Bookends and Endnotes.
And there are a lot of more features, helping with professional writing.
I used Scrivener for my dissertation, which I liked, but I wanted to transition to something markdown-based with better iOS and iPadOS access. Now, for the book based upon the dissertation, I’m using Ulysses (along with using it for all of my academic writing — everything from blog posts to journal articles to talks). I like it; I do think citation management is a little bit of a pain point there as compared to an academia-focused dedicated tool like Zettlr, which I have sometimes used, but overall I love it for book writing and am finding it quite lovely.
Would you use Ulysses if you had to do your dissertation again?
I think I would. On the one hand, it is a little easier to use Scrivener as an all-in-one writing environment and keep everything for the dissertation there — resources, outlines, images, etc. — but then I think for subsequent writing projects it’s a little bit challenging to use those materials since they’re squirreled away. Also I do like markdown as I am much, much less distracted by weird formatting idiosyncrasies in the writing environment than I used to be when I was writing in Scrivener.
That being said, I do think for a project like a dissertation, at least for me, writing in Ulysses means you may need some other tools — an outliner, for example — to help structure your work. I find myself using the Mindnode + Ulysses combination to great effect in restructuring the dissertation in book form, and I imagine I will use it for my next book, which I’m just starting the early stages of now.
I appreciate I am late to this thread and would concur that your best choice of tools are those for which you can most readily get support from your colleagues, but I would also throw R Bookdown into the mix, particularly if you have to include any type of statistical analysis or charts.
Bookdown is built in the R programming language and uses an extended flavour of Markdown + YAML headers for basic markup, Critically it allows R code to be embedded in the markup to run any data processing you like as the book is “compiled”. This makes keeping the text up to date with evolving data much, much simpler. R’s graphical tools are very good, so it’s highly unlikely that you’d need any thing else.
Beyond this, one of the outputs that Bookdown can create is LaTex, meaning you can, if you need, polish the typography and formatting at the very end. Indeed that is what the author suggests; leave the polish until the heavy work of writing is complete.
R Bookdown works well with the R Studio IDE, although I have to say Studio feels a little clunky in comparison to more modern IDEs. It does, however, have the great advantage of being cross platform (Windows & Linux) making it easier to work with those outside the Apple garden.
Finally, on a slightly different topic, I’d strongly suggest you familiarise yourself with a good version control system and keep all your writings (and any data and code) in it. Git seems to be the flavour du jour, but personally I use Fossil because it’s easy to run locally; but then I likely a complete outlier in my choices!