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.
I just want to be left alone to write.
I know that this is exactly what Ulysses is for, but since U3 turned out to be a note taking application rather than a software for creating books, I still haven’t found “my” place to construct and write.
A no-fuss-mode could make Scrivener the best of both worlds, and it wouldn’t even have to be all that different.
No font choices (the font is chosen in the preferences anyway; I never understood the need to change fonts mid-text), no indenting (this would happen on export or when simply returning to fuss-mode).
Whether whatever formatting is needed should happen via WYSIWYG or Markdown, would be a judgement call, I guess. I vastly prefer Ulysses’ idea of marking text instead of layouting (i.e. not making something bold, but marking it as “emphasized”), but for me personally it’s less about the file format being txt and more about not being bothered while I’m trying to write.
You used to be able to do this in Ulysses and you have always been able to do this in Scrivener. I’ve used it to write two books without having to worry about layout or formatting. That’s what the compile settings are for. I can tell Scrivener to put the word ‘chapter’ followed by a chapter number at the start of each document and make the document heading appear in bold halfway down the first page. Keith has added to options to make the compile-time set up even more flexible. I just discovered that I can strip trailing whitespace from the end of each document during compilation, which helps get rid of erroneous blank pages in the final output.
After getting an iPad two years ago, it quickly became my main working tool. I write, teach, research, draw and record with it. (Just bought the 128GB version!)
Daedalus exemplifies what I love about the iPad working experience, as Daedalus is so nimble, elegant and yet powerful.
I will be purchasing Ulysses III for my MacBook Pro and can’t wait to test out the integration with Daedalus. Thank you for making these tools.
The integration between U III and DT via icloud is very nice. My only qualm is that you can’t use attachments (like PDFs) with stuff you sync via icloud. Not sure where the problem is, if in DT or icloud, but it’s definitely a limitation. That’s a feature I’d like to see implemented.
You know you’re always welcome around these parts, Marcus.
Brr, Skitch 2. There was an app that went from one of the best simple ideas to a mess in one fell swoop. It was a program that made our support easier instantly, and then they took away everything that made it so good and useful. Fortunately, I still have the old version installed…
Great to hear that you’re all re-energised with U3, and I hope it continues to do well for you guys. I look forward to seeing where you go with it.
I’m not sure how it it matters to the end user what format is used to save the text inside the .scriv container. You should never touch those raw files anyway. If Scrivener used a compressed or flat file format, you wouldn’t even know that it uses the RTF format. There’s nothing preventing you from treating them like plain text. Turn off the ruler, change the font to Menlo or Monaco, and set up the formatting to use no indents or line spacing.
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.
Well, there are plenty of examples of books with sections written using different fonts (for letters, or code blocks for instance). There’s also the point that if the font is set only in the preferences, then you couldn’t have different documents within the project using different fonts, and a user may well want a character or location sheet using a different font to the main text.
Again, why not just hide the Formatting bar if you don’t use it, hide the ruler, and set up your preferences to have no indents? The effect would be just the same.
Exactly. I guess I don’t understand how any of this bothers you while you are writing, though, as you can just turn it all off and get it out of the way. I very rarely bother with formatting while writing myself.
I agree with Keith on this. I use Scrivener pretty much as a text editor when I write in it, I don’t see how the many options that others may use can get in the way. You just ignore them while you write
I tested UIII / Daedalus, for notes, songs and short stories, it’s just perfect. Especially about the sync osx/ios. I do not want to use iCloud, Dropbox, itunes etc… for synchronization. With a tiny freeware “MediaMaster Server” on osx, I synchronizes on webdav without knowing nothing to webdav. And it works! And that’s exactly what I was looking for a long time. Finally, a simple trick! So I cross my fingers that Scrivener IOS can synchronize webdav (or as simple). Because there is novels too in life!
(UD, MediaMaster Server work perfectly with “sync with external folder” and Daedalus, crazy, crazy, crazy! so Literature and Latte can take all their time now with iScrivener. :mrgreen:
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
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!
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.
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
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.
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 …
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.
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.
