Have any of you use Scrivener with NWP (best of all, incorporating right to left languages)? I know @Ihnatko uses it but so far as I know he does not use Hebrew or the kind of formatting I will need.
I am in the early stages of my book on Targum Ruth and I thought this time I would try and be organized from the beginning. I am putting bibliography into Bookends and Scrivener’s method of organizing multiple documents, including research documents (I have all the articles I have pulled in pdf format and they can be stored and accesed within Scrivener), looks very promising. My concern is when I need to send it out to NWP. I do not want to have to do a ton of formatting. I have tried with small documents and footnotes, etc. work when sending as rtf (rtfd does NOT work with foonotes).
So, anyone have thoughts on this?
About Scrivener
Scrivener is a word processor and project management tool created specifically for writers of long texts such as novels and research papers. It won’t try to tell you how to write – it just makes all the tools you have scattered around your desk available in one application.
Focus on Writing
Scrivener provides access to the full power of the OS X text system: add tables, bullet points and images and format your text however you want. Define ranges of text as footnotes and they become footnotes when you export or print. And because the way you view your text onscreen may not always be how you want to see it in print, Scrivener makes it easy to format the printed or exported text completely differently from what is onscreen – leaving you free to focus on the actual writing.
No more switching between multiple applications to refer to research files: keep all of your research – image files, PDF documents, movies, sound files and web pages – right inside Scrivener. And unlike in other programs that only let you see one document in a window at a time, in Scrivener you can view a research document in one pane and compose your text in another right alongside it. Transcribe an interview, make notes about a picture, or just refer back to another chapter, all from within the same program.
3 thoughts on “Scrivener, Nisus Writer Pro, and Hebrew/Aramaic”
Chris, do you follow this fellow OT Blogger at all:
http://hevel.org/
He wrote about Scrivener a couple months ago:
http://hevel.org/2009/01/another-amazing-tool-for-writers-scrivener/
Thanks Mike! Bryan is in my newsfeed reader, but I have been far behind in reading and a Google search didn’t turn up his blog for me. (My search terms did not include Mellel, for example.) I will go and read it now!
I have been a big fan of Scrivener for a while, but I have used it mainly for presentations and shorter pieces that did not have much need for formatting. I am currently writing an introduction to the prophets in it, so I hope that things will work without too much fiddling.
Typesetting the Hebrew language is a complex issue that depends on which fonts you’re using and what encoding scheme, plus which word processor you will use to create the final manuscript. I use the LaserHebrew Unicode font in Scrivener in right-to-left mode without problems, and the export to Mellel works as expected.
In other words, I think you’ll be fine. You may need to do some trial and error in the compile stage, and do some global search-and-replace in NWP, but it shouldn’t be too much trouble.
The good thing on the Mac is that Scrivener uses the built-in capabilities of OS X, so interoperability is good. There are some limitations when going off the farm, however. For example, bullet points do not translate well from Scrivener into Word for Mac. You might guess what my solution to that problem is.