Journler is one of those apps that has a terrific cult following, and that I keep meaning to try again. I remember liking it a lot the last time I played with it, but haven’t spent much time with it in a while.

I’d welcome other folks to chime in here. Anybody put Journler and Scrivener side by side who wants to share their results (and criteria)?

Not to be silly, but isn’t relying on the Finder, relying on one application to manage different kinds of data? Don’t worry, I’m with you on the concept of keeping programs tidy and focussed on their intent, but I’m not sure I follow you on this argument. An application should be able to address different kinds of data, if those kinds of data pose an intersection of purpose in alignment with the intention of the application (like the Finder). You even mentioned one yourself in a positive light. Preview can handle several different kinds of data (and in my opinion it fails at PDFs, but that is just me).

So the question is whether or not having research data together with your working draft a valid intersection? Some people couldn’t live without it. The ability to stop and start an audio stream while writing is very useful, or to have a PDF loaded in another split. For those that don’t need it, well, just don’t drop media into Scrivener then. :) It isn’t as if you are forced to do so. There is even a handy way to cross-reference URLs and local files to parts of the draft.

I think it does less managing than you think. There are no actual editing features for non-text media types. You can however open them in proper editors from within Scrivener, edit them and save them. In this sense it acts more like a hub (Finder) for data, than something which tries to be everything.

How is having a Scrivener project better than just having a project folder?

It actually isn’t all that different, and where they are different, there are valid pros and cons for each method. Scrivener projects are just bundles. The only “proprietary” data is binary optimised XML for speed. You can even disable that by turning on external versioning support, which makes the whole project plain text at the slight cost of saving and opening speed. That’s really it, XML, RTFs, and whatever other kinds of media you put into it.

And how good is it at legal/academic writing, which relies very heavily on footnotes that must be formatted just so?

It isn’t a formatting engine, as once again it doesn’t try to “be everything,” rather it is a drafting tool. Something you use before the final stage of making it look pretty or up to spec. Remember, this tool is focussed at writers, most of whom need never worry about fonts, line spacing, and so on. However it does export fully valid RTF footnotes, which can then be formatted using a proper word processor. That Pages cannot read valid RTF footnotes is not exactly Scrivener’s fault. File a bug report with Apple. Contrary to your experience, there are a lot of people who use Scrivener for academic, legal, and scientific use.

As for Word styles, no. Again it is an Apple limitation. Scrivener relies on Apple’s exporters for most things. These exporters haven’t been significantly updated since Tiger came out. The alternative would be coding an RTF engine from the ground up, trying to keep up with Microsoft’s constant fiddling with black-boxed formats, and so on. That isn’t really a practical use of time for a single developer.

Some people must have their styles though, from start to finish, if you need styles and simply cannot put up with Word’s auto-style to get 85% of the work done for you, then using a drafting tool in general is probably not the best move.

I agree 100% with this. I have no idea why no company has developed a standalone word processor that just applies styles. Scrivener would be next to perfect if it just had styles -- and it's not impossible; the developer could implement it the way he implements footnotes. Word is next to useless because once you set up your style library, all the rest of the features never get used and tend to get in the way.

Anyway, there is one modern program that does exactly what you want: Adobe InDesign. It has a raw text "story editor" window that allows no formatting at all, only the application of styles. Applied paragraph style names are listed alongside your text on the left hand side. Other than that it's plain text... complete separation of content and presentation; you have to go back to the main InDesign window to set up your styles and format things. You can create and collapse footnotes in the story editor as well. The story editor even comes with built in custom looks to emulate green text on a black screen, or the amber text on blue of WordPerfect of yore. Unfortunately it doesn't use standard OS X text rendering routines, so you may have to futz around until you find a font that looks good... on LCD monitors I also prefer to select the "soft" anti-aliasing option in the style window.

As a bonus, InDesign generates great looking output (it has fantastic hyphenation and general typographic layout routines, including niceties like microtypography and margin kerning). InDesign, being intended to lay out books, is also extremely reliable for long documents (light years ahead of Word here) and complicated, multi-page tables.

There is also a team-based version of InDesign's story editor called "InCopy" designed for groups of writers working on a single publication. If you're only writing for yourself, it's not different enough from the built in story editor to warrant a look.

yesno,

contrary to your assessment, Scrivener absolutely excels at academic writing for me. I am an academic writer and switching to Scrivener just saved my current book project, or at least cranked up my productivity on the project to a point where I can actually finish it in time. I love the way Footnotes and comments show up in-line in Scrivener. I used to rely heavily on styles, but have found that I spent much more time worrying about formating in the drafting stages that way, time that would have been much better spent doing the actual writing. I use four custom styles in Scrivener now and they are enough for my book—which of course relies heavily on footnotes as well. Formating is the least of my concerns. I can pay someone to do the formating if I’m in a pinch—but the writing I have to do myself. And Scrivener excels at that as no other program I have tried does. Contrary to popular belief, academic writing IS creative writing, just creative in a slightly different way than a novel or a short story would be.

But, as with all creative tools, Scrivener is not for everyone and does not need to be. It just hits the sweet spot for a lot of creative writers— journalistic, fictional or academic. And we tend to be quite passionate about it too. :-)

Just my 2 ¢ (Euro).

J

UPDATE: I should have clarified that relying on styles and fiddling with formats is not necessarily causally linked. Just the programs that do have full support for styles (such as Word or Pages) encouraged me to do such fiddling. I intend to use Multimarkdown in Scrivener for my next project.

Hi

I have the same dream program; I’ve often thought about thoroughly hacking OpenOffice.org, and just removing all the junk:

1. styles are mandatory; everything is styled only via the associated stylesheet.

2. pictures are placed “as character”.

3. dtd like structure (maybe docbook like) is enforced.

I like Lyx a lot, but find it’s output too limited (basically only pdf/ps). Customers often want/demand .doc files. I also find formatting to my preferences impossible.

For large documentation I’ve tried these:

• manual docbook + dsssl stylesheets. Pros: very good integration with our version control systems. Cons: Impossible to have a mental image of the document while editing. drowning in angle brackets. Hard to format output to my liking. Hard to output .doc files

• XMetal. Docbook editting with some stylesheets for the looks. Same pros and cons, except better overview while editing

• Word: Cons: has absolutely no structure. styles are optional and often problematic. Documents get corrupted, especially when using multi documents

• Restructured Text: Pros: very simple nonintrusive tagging of plain text Cons: output layout impossible to control. Loose overview of documentation, really only for small documents

• OpenOffice Same as Word really, except it’s less likely to corrupt your document, and the document navigation works much better.

I find this idea of using OpenOffice.org as the basis for a real writers tool intriguing, I wonder if I’ll ever get around to implementing it.

Hi,

as a Linux to Mac OS adopter I really come to adore the concept of Open Source, so I write EVERYTHING in LyX right now. It:

• prevents me from fiddling with styles and formating and I can concentrate on my writing.
• it produces LaTeX and PDF which is important for collaboration with others.
• it uses a plain text markup file that is easy to backup and put into a version repository.

And yes, I mainly do academic writing…

I never get my mind around anything other than a folder to keep the stuff in, I tried some of the mentioned programs but no luck, I guess I give Scrivener another try.

Andi