How did you make it working? The setup is a no brainer, but when Daedalus tries to import from the Scrivener synced external folder the draft folder is greyed out. If I set up the Draft folder as root in MediaMaster server, I see the individual files but they are still greyed out. What am I missing? File extension is correct. I am puzzled
EDIT: It does work with Notebooks for iOS, so it's not a MediaMaster issue. There must be something in my DT settings that interferes but I can't figure out what. Is there anything I am not thinking about? It does seem so simple that it's hard to believe though. Anyway, any feedback will be appreciated
Ulysses III
Flexo wrote:No font choices (the font is chosen in the preferences anyway; I never understood the need to change fonts mid-text)
I'm writing an essay with several citations of Homeric Greek, Linear B, Hebrew, Arabic, Ancient Italian dialects. Please, leave me the ability of changing font mid-text!
Paolo
Last edited by ptram on Wed Apr 30, 2014 9:22 am, edited 1 time in total.
ptram wrote:Flexo wrote:No font choices (the font is chosen in the preferences anyway; I never understood the need to change fonts mid-text)
I'm writing an essay with several citations of Homeric Greek, Linear B, Hebrew, Arabic, Ancent Italian dialects. Please, leave me the ability of changing font mid-text!
Paolo
Although I don’t use Ulysses, the need to change fonts mid-text is critical. I agree with Paolo. I write in English, but often cite and write in Hebrew and Greek. I would not use a program for serious writing that did not support that capability.
KB wrote:Flexo wrote:Same here. I love the possibilities that Scrivener offers for organising and developing, but when it comes to the actual writing, the WYSIWYG system drives me nuts. I don't want to bother with (or be bothered by) the fonts, the formatting, the indenting.
As Rayz says, you don't need to be bothered by any of this stuff in Scrivener. You can override all the formatting in Compile. Some users like to set up their text in the editor exactly as they want it to appear when exported; you can do that if you want. But if you just want to write and worry about all of the other stuff later, you can do that too. For me, it depends on the project.
For the record: My problem wasn't the export or the ability to switch typefaces. It just annoyed the hell out of me that whenever I started to write, it was never long until I pressed the down arrow or the right arrow one too many times, and Scrivener would switch back to the default setting, forcing me once again to, however shortly, stop writing and fiddle with the WYSIWYG system, losing my train, or rather hand-drawn cart of thought.
Buuuuut, I tried tucking everything away and converting everything to the default font. It all looks nicely basic now, and so far I haven't been able to reproduce the font-switch.
I've started working on something (first time in a long time), and since Ulysses isn't really for writing books anymore, I'll give Scrivener another try. Maybe by the time the iOS version comes around, I'll be knee-deep in it
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AmberV
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Yeah, I'd say your font switching problem was definitely an exception and not the norm. I don't myself use Scrivener "like a text editor" because I enjoy having its considerably useful editing features at my disposal, like revision modes, annotations, highlights and so forth. I don't understand why anyone would voluntarily give that stuff up---but that stuff aside I pretty much do treat it like plain-text, and my default formatting emulates the way a plain-text document looks. No psuedo-spacing inserted around paragraphs, fixed-width fonts, etc. I also leave the ruler and format bar turned off, as well as the toolbar. It makes Scrivener a very minimalist and efficient interface. I can't say I've ever seen a font switching problem---but my default paste is "Paste and Match Style", and I never actually change the text font while writing---so there is very little room for format pollution to occur. That's all fine to say, but the important thing is that I never think about formatting. That's really what we're looking for when we ask for that I think. We just don't want to be bothered by fonts and such---and I can't remember the last time I've worried about what text would look like when I started typing. It always does what I expect, and thus it has become something that ceases to exist in my mind as a burden.
The fact that I can change the formatting doesn't weigh down on me, I suppose, and I don't think of highlighters as being "formatting", even though I technically know they are. That's the "Zen" that I always enjoyed back when I used Ulysses, anyway.
The fact that I can change the formatting doesn't weigh down on me, I suppose, and I don't think of highlighters as being "formatting", even though I technically know they are. That's the "Zen" that I always enjoyed back when I used Ulysses, anyway.
.:.
Ioa Petra'ka
“Whole sight, or all the rest is desolation.” —John Fowles
Ioa Petra'ka
“Whole sight, or all the rest is desolation.” —John Fowles
Ulyssess III v1.1 is out, and is much improved.
Aside from the global search (no replace yet), the export has been completely revamped to use CSS-like styles to handle the formatting. Easy to understand, a doddle to use, and infinitely extensible. Very clever stuff.
I'm still not sure about having every piece of text in the same workspace though; I like to keep separate projects separate. After four novels I imagine its going to be pretty unwieldy. It's also not really geared for storing other stuff like pictures, character sheets, odd bits research etc, which is fair enough because it's being sold as a pure writing tool and nothing else.
Well worth a look, just for the fantastic export functions.
Aside from the global search (no replace yet), the export has been completely revamped to use CSS-like styles to handle the formatting. Easy to understand, a doddle to use, and infinitely extensible. Very clever stuff.
I'm still not sure about having every piece of text in the same workspace though; I like to keep separate projects separate. After four novels I imagine its going to be pretty unwieldy. It's also not really geared for storing other stuff like pictures, character sheets, odd bits research etc, which is fair enough because it's being sold as a pure writing tool and nothing else.
Well worth a look, just for the fantastic export functions.
As if I didn't talk enough: Dom on Writing
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Jordi MoraJo
Rayz wrote:Ulyssess III v1.1 is out, and is much improved.
Aside from the global search (no replace yet), the export has been completely revamped to use CSS-like styles to handle the formatting. Easy to understand, a doddle to use, and infinitely extensible. Very clever stuff.
I'm still not sure about having every piece of text in the same workspace though; I like to keep separate projects separate. After four novels I imagine its going to be pretty unwieldy. It's also not really geared for storing other stuff like pictures, character sheets, odd bits research etc, which is fair enough because it's being sold as a pure writing tool and nothing else.
Well worth a look, just for the fantastic export functions.
I upgraded yesterday and exported a few articles I'd written as would-be chapters of a book that will never be commissioned using the `send to i-Book' export function, just for, y'know, fun ...
Ulysses III has reached version 1.2, and it's a really nice upgrade.
Highlights:
The style exchange, which should take a lot of the drudgery out of creating layouts for export.
The goals functionality is a stunning piece of UI work; simple and versatile.
It's my first choice for shorter work, but the philosophy behind it means that I still prefer Scrivener for novel-length pieces.
A few niggles and bugs, but it's coming along very nicely.
Highlights:
The style exchange, which should take a lot of the drudgery out of creating layouts for export.
The goals functionality is a stunning piece of UI work; simple and versatile.
It's my first choice for shorter work, but the philosophy behind it means that I still prefer Scrivener for novel-length pieces.
A few niggles and bugs, but it's coming along very nicely.
As if I didn't talk enough: Dom on Writing
In the past few days, I tried out Ulysses III. Very pleasant experience. Very elegant user interface, which really deserves an award. And very well advertised on their, again beautiful, website.
But definitely no tool for academic writing. Nor for writing complex novels. Ulysses III is for …… well, I think for people who don't write too long and too complex things, for whom design is really important, who love the way in which certain features are tucked away, and so on.
A horse for a ride in the countryside. But no horse for ploughing the land, for going into battle, for crossing the desert.
I feel sorry to say this, but I liked the old Ulysses better.
But definitely no tool for academic writing. Nor for writing complex novels. Ulysses III is for …… well, I think for people who don't write too long and too complex things, for whom design is really important, who love the way in which certain features are tucked away, and so on.
A horse for a ride in the countryside. But no horse for ploughing the land, for going into battle, for crossing the desert.
I feel sorry to say this, but I liked the old Ulysses better.
Scrivener – Nisus – Bookends – Devonthink – Lightroom ••• MacMini 2018 / MacBook Pro 2014 (10.14.6) – iPhone 7 (13.5)
I went there and came back / It was nothing special / The river at high tide / The mountain veiled by misty rain
I went there and came back / It was nothing special / The river at high tide / The mountain veiled by misty rain
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serpententacle
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Thought I'd share this:
http://davidhewson.com/2014/10/writing-ulyssesiii/
Hewson's writing a book about Ulysses III.
http://davidhewson.com/2014/10/writing-ulyssesiii/
Hewson's writing a book about Ulysses III.
Timotheus wrote:I
But definitely no tool for academic writing. Nor for writing complex novels. Ulysses III is for …… well, I think for people who don't write too long and too complex things, for whom design is really important, who love the way in which certain features are tucked away, and so on.
.
I have to agree with Timotheus here. I really wanted to like Ulysses, as design is "really important " for me, the design is beautiful, and sometimes I do crave a simpler experience than Scrivener provides (probably an unavoidable consequence of Scrivener's greater flexibility and number of options). But even though I use very few of Scrivener's many features, those I use are important to my preferred workflow. Maybe I just couldn't figure out how to do it, but even a couple of fairly basic functions (like displaying two texts side by side, one holding notes, the other the article I'm writing) proved either difficult or impossible. And some of the pretty design I was able to replicate in Scrivener via preferences.
Maybe I didn't give it enough of a chance (just wrote a few medium length stories with it), but I failed to find anything Ulysses could accomplish that I couldnt already do with my current combo of IaWriter and Scrivener, and several things I wanted to do , and that I can do easily enough with the current set up , but couldn't in Ulysses, at least not easily. Maybe it's just that after using Scrivener for so long and so productively, I've just adjusted to its way of doing things, or maybe it's that Scrivener allows me to work the way I prefer: writing in chunks that can be easily rearranged.
That said, I'd love to have a Markdown friendly mode in Scrivener, to save me the step of exporting to Writer, but it's hardly a big deal. I can use the basic Markdown syntax in Scrivener, export to Writer, and it'll format accordingly.
I always worry, with Ulysses as well as Scrivener, that I'm just not using the app to its fullest, and there are probably ways to bend Ulysses to my will, or change my way of working to a more efficient and Ulysses-comporting method. Maybe a future version will add what I need. But really, Scrivener already does exactly what I need it to do, in part because Keith has added features I and others requested, and I don't see anything in Ulysses that would allow me to do those things more easily, or that adds features or capabilities that I need and that Scrivener doesn't provide.
I certainly appreciate the Ulysses designers' excellent work, and I,m sure it's ideal for many writers, better and easier to master than the complex Scrivener. But from what I can tell so far, for my needs, Scrivener is currently a much better match, and I feel very fortunate that Keith created it for writers like me.
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xiamenese
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brett wrote:Timotheus wrote:I
But definitely no tool for academic writing. Nor for writing complex novels. Ulysses III is for …… well, I think for people who don't write too long and too complex things, for whom design is really important, who love the way in which certain features are tucked away, and so on.
.
I have to agree with Timotheus here. ……
Maybe it's just that after using Scrivener for so long and so productively, I've just adjusted to its way of doing things, or maybe it's that Scrivener allows me to work the way I prefer: writing in chunks that can be easily rearranged.
……
I always worry, with Ulysses as well as Scrivener, that I'm just not using the app to its fullest, and there are probably ways to bend Ulysses to my will, or change my way of working to a more efficient and Ulysses-comporting method .……
I haven’t even tried Ulysses. With all due respect to the developers — who, clearly from all the comments, have done an excellent job — I really don’t need it. I do virtually everything in Scrivener, and Scrivener allows me to do it the way I’m happy with. Any, short, one or two page, one-off things I have to write I do in Nisus, where I have templates set up for those specific purposes.
And I don’t worry about the fact that I only use a fraction of Scrivener’s capabilities … you might like to look at my post in
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=29344
to see how long it took me to use Scrivener as more than just a kind of typing-processor where I could have two documents open side by side in a single interface. The thing is, Scrivener allows me to write what I want to write in the way that suits me. I don’t even use NWP ’to its fullest’ … in both, I use those features that I have found a need for and only learn others when it suddenly hits me that I could make good use of some as yet untried feature. I certainly wouldn’t be comfortable using an app that required me to work its way, or one that I had to ‘bend to my will’. I’ve met those in the past and our relationship was always short-lived.
So, I’m sure Ulysses is a great app for those who find a need or use for it, but I’m not in that camp.
Mr X
The Scrivenato sometimes known as Mr X.
iMac 27" (late 2015) 10.15.4, 24GB RAM, 512GB SSID
MBP17" (late 2011) 10.13.6, 16GB RAM, 2TB SSID
2017 iPad, iPadOS 13.3, 128GB, Apple Pencil
Scrivener, Scapple, Nisus Writer Pro, Bookends …
iMac 27" (late 2015) 10.15.4, 24GB RAM, 512GB SSID
MBP17" (late 2011) 10.13.6, 16GB RAM, 2TB SSID
2017 iPad, iPadOS 13.3, 128GB, Apple Pencil
Scrivener, Scapple, Nisus Writer Pro, Bookends …
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serpententacle
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I have to step in here at this point and share my own personal experiences with Ulysses 3. I have been a long time Scrivener user, first off, and I've praised it up and down to everyone I could. I would swear by it, all throughout Grad School. And I give Scrivener much respect as a brilliant piece of software for writers.
Then I began to discover something about the way that I write. I've never been a planner. I would have one central idea (I guess a Writer's Statement) and I would begin my novel heading toward that idea, or even building up around it. It's off the cuff. And the most important thing to me was just writing. Yet often times, while in RTF software, I would find myself spending more time formatting and setting type and forcing outlines, and all these distractions that kept me from writing.
Then I discovered Ulysses 3. Not only is it geared toward getting the writing down, it makes it easy and brings the joy back. I found myself writing more with Ulysses and my productivity as a novelist increased. It was like a re-birth. I began seeing my projects through to their ends, instead of abandoning them halfway through bogged down under over-planning.
This year I have decided to do NaNoWriMo with Ulysses and so far it's been a smashing success for me.
With the way Ulysses is set up there's a "Library" instead of a "Binder"... you can divide it—make groups, filters, chapter sheets, all the necessary tools you need to organize your novel. I find the UI simply breathtaking, and the themes are easy to set, there's only the preferences you need, no more no less. It's streamline and deft. It is strictly geared to sticking the writing down. And stick it does.
As far as those who say it is best for short pieces... I strongly disagree with that, and I am living proof that it can handle large novels. I even threw in my 275,000 word opus into it, and am giving it a thrice over in the editing process. Ulysses is formidable.
And as far as output, there are style templates in the exporting process. You can select from various purposes—it will save your work in a novel submission, article submission, French Novel format and many more: http://styles.ulyssesapp.com. It formats itself in the exporting process. It can convert your plain text sheets and projects to Word docs, RTF docs, and Text Edit, or HTML.
And as far as the split screen and two documents side by side. In Ulysses you can do this by opening one of your projects in a window, resize it, and open your other document and resize it... and you can have two documents on the same screen side by side. Pretty simple.
One more thing... I don't understand why some people post reviews upon never using a product, or even only scratching the surface of it. I have used both Ulysses and Scrivener throughout large projects and both of them are incredible. And I don't ever plan on abandoning Scrivener forever. I plan on coming back to it from time to time, and I look forward to the strides that Scrivener makes in the future, and I especially look forward to their IOS app. But for now, I have found my home and writer's studio in Ulysses 3.
Then I began to discover something about the way that I write. I've never been a planner. I would have one central idea (I guess a Writer's Statement) and I would begin my novel heading toward that idea, or even building up around it. It's off the cuff. And the most important thing to me was just writing. Yet often times, while in RTF software, I would find myself spending more time formatting and setting type and forcing outlines, and all these distractions that kept me from writing.
Then I discovered Ulysses 3. Not only is it geared toward getting the writing down, it makes it easy and brings the joy back. I found myself writing more with Ulysses and my productivity as a novelist increased. It was like a re-birth. I began seeing my projects through to their ends, instead of abandoning them halfway through bogged down under over-planning.
This year I have decided to do NaNoWriMo with Ulysses and so far it's been a smashing success for me.
With the way Ulysses is set up there's a "Library" instead of a "Binder"... you can divide it—make groups, filters, chapter sheets, all the necessary tools you need to organize your novel. I find the UI simply breathtaking, and the themes are easy to set, there's only the preferences you need, no more no less. It's streamline and deft. It is strictly geared to sticking the writing down. And stick it does.
As far as those who say it is best for short pieces... I strongly disagree with that, and I am living proof that it can handle large novels. I even threw in my 275,000 word opus into it, and am giving it a thrice over in the editing process. Ulysses is formidable.
And as far as output, there are style templates in the exporting process. You can select from various purposes—it will save your work in a novel submission, article submission, French Novel format and many more: http://styles.ulyssesapp.com. It formats itself in the exporting process. It can convert your plain text sheets and projects to Word docs, RTF docs, and Text Edit, or HTML.
And as far as the split screen and two documents side by side. In Ulysses you can do this by opening one of your projects in a window, resize it, and open your other document and resize it... and you can have two documents on the same screen side by side. Pretty simple.
One more thing... I don't understand why some people post reviews upon never using a product, or even only scratching the surface of it. I have used both Ulysses and Scrivener throughout large projects and both of them are incredible. And I don't ever plan on abandoning Scrivener forever. I plan on coming back to it from time to time, and I look forward to the strides that Scrivener makes in the future, and I especially look forward to their IOS app. But for now, I have found my home and writer's studio in Ulysses 3.
Last edited by serpententacle on Mon Jul 27, 2015 4:37 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Thanks for this report. I definitely know what you mean about the formatting paralysis, which is why I like using iAWriter so much -- no choices! And that's why I've set up Scrivener (which admittedly took quite awhile) in a way that frees me from having to make those choices again. Of course, a writer who owns neither app might have to account for that formatting paralysis in making a choice between Scrivener and Ulysses.
I'd love to hear more about how our fellow Scriveners are using Ulysses, especially if they can detail specific steps in the process, and what Ulysses does for them that Scrivener doesn't. I don't know what Keith thinks, but I'd also welcome specific suggestions about what aspects of the Ulysses experience/UI Scrivener might adopt.
As for why
The answer is: I'm trying help my fellow Scriveners by sharing MY experience with Ulysses. Maybe I was able to only scratch the surface, but I spent as much time with Ulysses as its free trial period and my experimentation time would allow. I actually make my living through my writing, and need to devote most of my time to actually writing rather than experimenting with software preferences, and I expect many of the other working writers here would face the same limits, so I hoped to save them some time by sharing my experience. Then I spent more than a little more time that I could otherwise be using to earn money instead sharing the results (with appropriate caveats so readers can judge them accordingly) in the hope that reporting my limited experience would be more valuable to some of my fellow Scriveners than not reporting anything at all. That's why I invited others who used Ulysses more than I was able to to weigh in as well.
The only way to experiment further would be to drop $30 or $50 on the app, and even then I can't see what it would do for me that I can't already do with the way I've set up Scrivener. Still, I'd love to hear from Ulysses users how they use the app in ways that Scrivener doesn't permit (or makes more difficult), and if I hear about some capability it offers that Scrivener doesn't and might be useful to me, I'd be happy to join Ulysses on another test voyage.
I'd love to hear more about how our fellow Scriveners are using Ulysses, especially if they can detail specific steps in the process, and what Ulysses does for them that Scrivener doesn't. I don't know what Keith thinks, but I'd also welcome specific suggestions about what aspects of the Ulysses experience/UI Scrivener might adopt.
As for why
serpententacle wrote: some people post reviews upon never using a product, or even only scratching the surface of it..
The answer is: I'm trying help my fellow Scriveners by sharing MY experience with Ulysses. Maybe I was able to only scratch the surface, but I spent as much time with Ulysses as its free trial period and my experimentation time would allow. I actually make my living through my writing, and need to devote most of my time to actually writing rather than experimenting with software preferences, and I expect many of the other working writers here would face the same limits, so I hoped to save them some time by sharing my experience. Then I spent more than a little more time that I could otherwise be using to earn money instead sharing the results (with appropriate caveats so readers can judge them accordingly) in the hope that reporting my limited experience would be more valuable to some of my fellow Scriveners than not reporting anything at all. That's why I invited others who used Ulysses more than I was able to to weigh in as well.
The only way to experiment further would be to drop $30 or $50 on the app, and even then I can't see what it would do for me that I can't already do with the way I've set up Scrivener. Still, I'd love to hear from Ulysses users how they use the app in ways that Scrivener doesn't permit (or makes more difficult), and if I hear about some capability it offers that Scrivener doesn't and might be useful to me, I'd be happy to join Ulysses on another test voyage.