scrivener

Note (26 Feb 2018): This post was written some years ago about Scrivener 2. It does not apply to Scrivener 3, which has happily addressed these gripes. This shouldn’t be so hard. I’ve reached the point where it’s time to compile my manuscript from Scrivener into Word format, in preparation for The Great Editing. Now, the Compile part is easy. (Well, I say “easy” in that it’s pretty complicated, but in a Scrivener way, and after you’ve been using Scrivener for a while, well, you eventually become something akin to a taxi driver in London; you eventually learn where those dead-ends and obscure addresses are....

Note (26 Feb 2018): This post was written some years ago about Scrivener 2. It does not apply to Scrivener 3. As a writing tool, I love Scrivener. Unfortunately this comes with some hindrances: Scrivener is not a standard format, so you have to compile and export anything you do to to anything with it. Microsoft Word is a standard format in publishing—obviously people in publishing are a bunch of masochists—but Scrivener’s exports to Word are unstyled....

Update 26 Feb 2018: This post was written about Scrivener 2 some years ago. While there is still a Scrivener 3 learning curve for anyone new to the application, the particulars are different in important areas. Overall, I think Scrivener 3 represents a huge improvement. For my writing—and editing, and prep for publication—I’ve been using Scrivener. It’s not an intuitive app by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it feels like something of a patchwork of basic functionality with miscellaneous add-ons....