Scrivener - Writers Software
So I’ve been trying some new writing tools for the thesis. Possibly a bit late in the game now but I’m still writing other things for various reasons, for example the UKAPU
newsletter editor and I’ve written a few magazine articles for the UK weekly computer magazine Micro Mart and not to mention I’m still writing academic papers.
So when I learnt of Scrivener , I thought I best give it a go. This app promised to be a great tool for those serious about writing so I thought I’d jump in. I won’t cover it in detail, others have mentioned it in other reviews online, I’ll just cover why it’s no good to me.
Impressions
Well I thought it looked good. Until I started playing with it and then quickly realised that it’s severely limited in terms of academic writing.
To write in LaTeX you need to either write it in LaTeX in the editor (and it’s not a great editor for doing that with I can assure you) and export the whole think as a text document or use Multi Markdown and then get that converted to LaTeX. Neither of which are done nicely in Scrivener (it lacks syntax highlighting, code completion etc).
it’s final nail is a lack of referencing software – referencing previous work is a cornerstone of academic research so this oversight is horrendous. It can be got around if you want to export your document to RTF format and use something like Zotero to reference your work (Zotero allows you to insert a reference citation field and then you can scan the compiled RTF document to add the references in).
Lastly, a lack of working Table of Contents system and ability to set headers/footers etc mean that for me, it’s a nice piece of software that goes wide of the mark. Perhaps for novelists it’ll be fine but for academic research, a few glaring omissions make it impractical.
LaTeX to RTF
So for a while, I’ve been using LaTeX to write up my work but every now and then someone wants a copy of my work in Word so they can edit it or mark it up and they cant use a PDF editor. This means converting my PDF into a Word document or my LaTeX file into a RTF document.
The PDF route was probably the easiest as everything was nicely laid out already and set out as it should be and various services on the web manage to convert PDF’s relatively well to Word documents such as Zamzar
However, the LaTeX to RTF option is also a possibility using the linux2rtf program however, that seems to be awkward at the best of times and annoyingly problematic at times. And it won’t run on OS X Lion because of the lack of Rosetta support (unless you build it in Macports but that requires a full LaTeX install via Macports as well!)
it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the answer was staring me in the face all this time. I’d blogged about Pandoc before here and it’s ability to turn Markdown into LaTeX code. Well, it does that and more. Turns out it can output to RTF as well (that’ll teach me to RTFM!) so a simple command of:
pandoc -s LaTeX.tex -o Output.rtf
gives me a very well formatted RTF document that matches the LaTeX document style pretty well.
For example, in the document in question, I was making use of the url package and the verbatim package quite regularly – Pandoc understands these and formatted them as described in the RTF! Excellent! I don’t know how well it would come with Tables, References and floats but that’s to try another day but considering it handled verbatim and url fine, I have high hopes. latex2rtf is dead, long live LaTeX to RTF!
So once again, top marks to Pandoc for it’s fantastic ability to read and convert documents!
Markdown, Pandoc, Mou and LaTeX
For those that haven’t guessed already, Markdown is my new thing. It’s a fantastic little language that allows you to quickly write HTML and XHTML without knowing HTML!
Writing with it is quite natural (for those fans of Reddit, it’s the code method used to write replys) as it’s fairly simple.
# Item
gives a headline.
**item**
gives bold text etc etc.
After using it for a bit in Reddit, I found Mou 
, a Markdown editor for Mac that lets you type on one side of the window whilst in realtime, updating the HTML preview on the right. Simple, easy and elegant. I started using this for writing in Evernote . Write a note in Mou, which is simple, easy and quick (without worrying to much about the formatting) then copy and paste the right side into Evernote for an awesome looking note (at least it is until it syncs to the server – workaround is to export the HTML to a normal HTML, open in a browser and copy into Evernote from there – not so pretty and a bit long winded – have asked Evernote why it’s a problem)
In terms of quickly formatting a block of text, Markdown is pretty damn good. So much so, it got me thinking. Could it be used for academic writing? Turns out with another program, it can! Using pandoc , you can easily convert Markdown into LaTeX. The output is actually pretty impressive! Better than I have expected from cnversion software anyhow!
For example, we can take the help file from Mou as an example. It’s Markdown for a section is this . This corresponds to this in an HTML (what you see in a browser) which is this . Not to shabby. Load up pandoc and use the command
pandoc -s file.html -o file.tex
to convert the HTML file into a LaTeX file and you get the following LaTeX code . The -s flag means standalone and thus it adds the required preamble to the LaTeX document. This is then converted into PDF in the LaTeX editor (and with a few flaws, thanks to the .ico file type used by Mou in the help file which is unrecognised by LaTeX) you get this as the output.
As you can see, it’s a pretty good representation in LaTeX to the HTML file.
Conclusion
I use LaTeX to write my reports in – most, if not all get formatted and written in LaTeX using the new, but excellent, Texpad . This app is fantastic but remembering LaTeX commands can be a pain and it’s also slow at times when all you need to do is write down a draft. Once you start adding references etc, LaTeX starts to shine.
However, for the drafting process, using Markdown and Pandoc can speed up the crucial part of putting words on sheets and pandoc means that converting from Markdown to LaTeX will require as little possible time for the end user. Which can only be a good thing at the end of the day!
