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Scrivener can seem overly complicated; you donāt have to use everything it offers. Thereās a video on Compiling at Literature & Latte. Their Scrivener videos tend to be very useful, I donāt even bother wit the iPadOS version other than to check something very quickly. The most helpful thing for me is using Scrivener is the Take Control of Scrivener digital book: Take Control of Scrivener 3 ā Take Control Books
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Mellel is great, especially if you need to mix languages or writing systems.
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If you are publishing with an academic or trade publisher, you wil need to use Microsoft Word once you get to editing.
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Critical advice IMO
Give enough time for the bloom of newness to wear off and the reality of day to day work intrude
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Probably because youāre not the intended audience. Itās a distinction for developers, not users. I was trying to explain why some apps might have better luck than others. As with some other Apple ānamesā they are used broadly.
- iCloud
- Siri
- Apple Intelligence
All of those are huge collections of features, many technically unrelated to others in under the same banner.
Is there room under that rock?
Seriously, though. Even if you use paper and pen, the pen might run out and you might spill water on your notebook. The dog could steal either. The cat will scratch one and eat the other. Youāll lose the pen between the couch cushions and the notebook in the bottom of a bag you already searched twice.
Yeah, iCloud might disappoint you. There are plenty of stories on here of it failing (including mine), but what you donāt see is all the stories of it quietly working for countless thousands (probably millions) of people.
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Although I understand the point, many of these can easily be mitigated against. The worst scenario would be losing it or having a fire. None of the above have happened to me in 30+ years of using a notebook. On the other hand, iCloud is outside of my control. There seem to be a lot of threads about data loss or it not syncing data. This also seems to happen more frequently if you have more data in iCloud. I have had issues in the recent past with iCloud not syncing photos. Once I reduced my photos it had no problem. This does question its scalability.
This is true, but I would propose that it is not primarily about mitigation.
If your dog eats your journal, your journal is eaten. Itās right there. You yell at the dog, buy a new journal, possibly transcribe anything that is still legible into a new one, etc.
What your dog does not do is go onto your desk, open your journal, and surgically remove half a dozen entries. Or go into your filing cabinet and randomly remove half a dozen tax receipts from two years ago.
That is my main concern with synchronization services. Itās possible for a folder with 1000 files to be missing a file or two and go undiscovered for an extended period of time. Maybe not a problem if there is a good chance it is just one of many duplicate photos, but a potentially much larger problem if it is a folder with your scanned tax documents.
It is absolutely true that the majority of iCloud users are not making public complaints. But it is also likely that quite a bit of data loss would be completely undiscovered, since the hypothetical chewed up journal isnāt laying there on the floor to be discovered.
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For iCloud issues, I used to have it on Apple Notes, besides the improvements in the app, syncing problem can be related to too big file sizes (like 30MB) which can make sync less prior especially due to battery and cellular connectivity.
Now the only issue occurs on Freeform app in which the attachments and sketches are usually big, and I have to wait unless I open any two devices together to trigger immediate sync.
That said, I donāt mean I rule out any other issues which can be bugs.
But for sure other clouds wonāt take much consideration of your current status of your devices. They just upload/download as long as their apps are on.
The problem, from my perspective, and the reason I abandoned markdown, is every supporter of markdown always leaves off the work ātextā.
As in, āMarkdown isnāt built to be the end-all for every type of text documentā
Markdown is useful, but just about everything I deal with in both my personal and professional life is no longer pure text.
My current tradeoff is to use a combination of RTF and PDF. (RTF mainly because Devonthink, my primary data organization tool, works well with RTF and conversions to /from).
Totally understand this workflow is not for a lot of tasks, not preaching, just explaining my current thinking and usage.
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Your summary makes me think that perhaps I drank too much of the Markdown Kool-Aid. Which, if I recall correctly, Iāve said something similar previously but subsequently forgot or was persuaded by an article or podcast otherwise.
If so, this may explain why I have struggled so mightily with my writing appsāIāve been trying to integrate material from a Markdown editor with more traditional word processor-related needs. The result is that though I have drafts of my articles for future reference, I end up doing a lot of reformatting in Pages. Now that Iāve given up on Ulysses, I may rely much more heavily on Scrivener (RTF) and Pages as needed and mostly abandoned Markdown except when really helpful.
Am I a basket case? And yes, this is a weird AI generated image using a photo of me in my study. 
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I deleted Ulysses from all of my devices yesterday.
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No comment. We love you anyway!
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I tried very hard for I think two years to use Markdown as my primary text mode for short-form writing including notes and blog posts.
I abandoned Markdown because it felt like more work, not less. I use Scrivener and Pages (and for trade publishing Microsoft Word at the edit phase), and BBEdit and Bear for everything else.
My notes are in very vanilla hand-coded HTML which on reside on my Mac, with backups in various places. This includes teaching notes, and reading/research notes.
Bear is a great way for me to wrote and stash fragments and early drafts; the final versions are polished in BBedit. Bear has decent HTML export.
I use templates and a CSS style sheet for locally served notes (all you need to read local HTML is any Web browser) and just paste the HTML into a CMS for blog posts.
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Iāve not used markdown for some time. Iāve never found it useful. I use Craft mostly. It has just enough formatting to do everything I need, except footnotes.
I might also dust off my copy of Scrivener!
@Bmosbacker mentioned not wanting to read the manual. Iām one of those geeky people who read the manual with whatever I buy. What Iāve discovered is that the manual tells me everything I need to know. I could guess, but that takes longer.
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Iāve used Word to prepare three books for an author for print. Once you create the styles, the rest was pretty easy.
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Styles are almost magical. Every publisher Iāve worked with relies on cust MS Word templates and styles, and then back-end scripts to prepare the Word files for import into Quark *back in the day), and now, In Design.
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@LisaSpangenberg, you have no idea how encouraging your response is. Because you are a scholar, your writing workflow and app choices carry considerable weight with me. The fact that youāve abandoned Markdown and use Scrivener and Pagesāwhich is exactly where Iām leaning after stepping away from Ulyssesāis very affirming. I plan to continue using Scrivener for my book and then export to Word and Vellum to finalize it.
Iāve looked briefly at Bearāitās a beautifully designed app. Is there a particular reason you prefer it over something like iA Writer?
Iāve also read quite a bit about BBEdit. Is there a meaningful use case for it if a person (notice that I avoid āoneā 
) doesnāt code?
Thank you again for taking the time to respond. Your comment, along with the input of several others, has strengthened my decision to do as much of my writing in Scrivener and Pages as possible. Now, I just need to master Scrivenerās perplexing compile process. Apparently, itās time to read the manual. And, stick to my decision.
There are worse things to being a basket case. 
I havenāt had a really good reason to use Vellum, but I want to use it. I just need to find the right excus . . reason.
Itās less fussy, partly, but mostly, it exports decent styled HTML and Iāve been using it since 2016. I havenāt look any farther once I found Bear.
I donāt code, either. If you ever need to massage text or clean it up to do something else with it, BBEdit has super tools for that, even in the free version. The paid version supports GREP, with the best explanation/guide to using Iāve seen.
You are most welcome. Do watch the Literature and Latte video on their site about compiling. The main reason I like the Take Control ebook book about Scrivener is that the way the books are organized itās very easy to go right to the feature you need to use at the time.
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