Although I know you mentioned in the Keynote episode (#34) that you’ve had mostly writers on your show and suggested that you can only talk about Scrivener so many times, but permit me suggest another way to talk about writing and Scrivener… Writing A Novel On Your Mac. Some of your guests have mentioned writing novels in passing, but most of the detailed discussions tend to be about getting blog or journalistic content online. I’m talking about going through the entire (non-online) writer’s workflow end-to-end with a guest who does this… e.g.

* I write my novels and short stories in MultiMarkdown
* for short stories or story/scene ideas I use Notational Velocity and/or WriteRoom
* for novels or more elaborate short stories and essays, I use Scrivener
* I use PlainText + Dropbox (previously used SimpleNote) to get this content to/from my iPhone (I can not wait for Scrivener 2.0 because of the syncing functionality!!!)
* I actually work on my novel on my iPhone as I commute to/from my day job
* I export the novel from Scrivener in MultiMarkdown and then use LaTeX as a means to produce a PDF in manuscript format to send to agents and publishers
* I use TextExpander all over the place… for instance, to add any special MultiMarkdown header information.
* I have a bunch of Automator scripts for moving files to the right locations or messing with the formatting when printing or converting text to audio and sending the audio to iTunes, etc…
* And so on

I realize this novel writing workflow might cater to too small a niche of listeners, so this may not be a viable discussion (though your guests do keep talking about NaNoWriMo. In any case, I bet the growth in Dropbox-friendly apps, along with Scrivener 2.0, will open up some very interesting new workflows…

Thanks again for all the work y’all do! Sorry for the long comment.

My productivity crutch: listening to your episodes too many times

My personal wish is a program that understands LaTeX, not just as export since I write things with lots of equations and other LaTeX features. Plus, syntax colouring is handy for these kinds of things. So, I generally find that I don’t use Ulysses that much, instead I use TextMate.

Happy Holidays.

Scott

MacPromote also just announced a 25% coupon: http://macpromote.com/mac-promo-scrivener-manage-large-writing-proj

Getting it for $30 seems like a no-brainer.

I will be interested to hear your next podcast which will, I understand, cover Circus Ponies.

One point though – Kate had mentioned that she was worried about being stuck in a proprietary system. All the files in a scrivener package are RTF. So your work is only stuck if you can’t read RTF.

You two do such a terrific job of presenting these topics. Once again thanks for all your hard work!

1. What is the best way to import Pages documents? I know they can be exported to Word/RTF, but is there any way to do it from the file level?

2. I understand the point of separating the writing process from the page layout process. I still wish it would be possible to tag paragraphs with styles, even if they don’t show up.

3. I have a couple specific programs that I use for textual study (Accordance and Logos), and there is no way I can think of exporting that data into Scrivener. Is there any way of linking to an external program file so that when you click on it it will open the file?

That’s it for now. Great show. I look forward to more to come!

Todd

Now I’m considering buying a copy, even though I am forced to do all my writing at work on a PC, so not even sure how much use I would get from it.

But it’s good to see the word processor being ‘re-thought’.