Very very interesting reads, thanks for sharing!
NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels
81–90 of 277 posts
Re: NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels
#82So I have been looking for something like this, and in fact the closest thing might be Highland 2. What I have been using is VScode with some scripts and other features. Really want an alternative to scrivener that keeps everything in markdown.
The key thing I miss in all the other versions is something that will:
1. Count the words in a chapter/scene/section
2. Give me a total based on the "in work" chapters/scenes/sections
For example suppose I am writing Chapter 1-9. I don't like Chapter 8 so I am rewriting an alternate. I want to know what the old chapter 8 word count is, what the new one is, and what the total word count is (and I can select which chapters or sections to include in the "total").
Looks like this does something like that so long as I put all the relevant chapters together in the same folder. (Good enough if I get to use Markdown.)
Only issue is, if I go into the folders, I don't see the Markdown files. Isn't that the point?
Re: NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not rtf, but it is rich text as opposed to plain text.
The point I am getting at is that if an editor wants to use markdown in place of rtf, fine. But it should hide the syntax just like rtf editors do (unless you want to see it). No editor that supports markdown to date has been able to achieve the quality of editing that rtf editors already have. So in essence outside of markdowns original use case of web publishing, why bother using it?
Here is the grand total of formatting supported by RTF in use in my novels:
* headers
* italics
* maybe 2-3 instances of *bold* through the entire text.
I don't need any additional "quality of editing". Hiding the syntax is irrelevant because the needs are so limited. Hiding the user interface on the other hand, matters to me, because it's a distraction (to others it isn't). My editor color-codes the headers and the italics, and having it stand out matters far more to me than that it looks the way it will in the formatted book, because my draft looks nothing like the finished book will anyway.
If you look at interviews with writers, you'll find a whole lot of obsession over the process, and things like how it feels to write with a pen vs. a typewriter vs. a word processor, and very, very little about what their drafts look like. It's far down the list of considerations you'll find novelists care about.
Nobody cares what the drafts look like, because they are transient. In fact you'll find a whole lot of authors advocate avoiding going back and editing and arguing for things like dictaphones etc. to make going back harder or using tools that won't let scroll up in some cases to simulate the typewriter experience, and all kinds of similar obsessions with spending as little time as possible on formatting and what the manuscript looks like in preference of being able to just dump the first draft into text the fastest way possible (while other authors want writing the first draft to take longer on purpose - to some that is a reason for using pens or pencils).
You mentioned Gaiman in another reply - someone who has talked at length about how since he wrote Stardust in a fountain pen he has come to enjoy being forced to rewrite his second draft entirely instead of being able to go back and forth and editing it since he switched to writing with pen on paper.
I'm sure you can find novelists that want to see a beautifully formatted manuscript while writing it. They have tools they can use.
But to suggest Markdown is some sort of big hindrance compared to some of the barriers novelists create for themselves on purpose doesn't pass the smell test for me.
Re: NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels
#84Outside of the more technically inclined; Does anyone who is a long-form (novel) writer actually use markdown? Outside of blogging, which it was invented for and makes total sense for syntax conversion of free formed text to html is there any real use for it? Obviously you don't have to use it if you don't want to, but it sort of feels odd to me that all these developers making writing/notes apps that neglect rich te…
I’m halfway through my second novel. Both in very barebones markdown (using pretty much only headings). Plain text is a blessing. I can keep everything in git, searching in emacs with swiper is fantastic (and good search is a must as the material grows) and any tool I lack I can hack together.
how do you convert from markdown to standard manuscript format which is often required for submissions?
Re: NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels
#85On Fiction.live https://fiction.live (twitch for webfiction) we use straight up HTML through a WYSIWYG editor. If there's an easily extensible markdown-like with full features for stuff common in webfiction like spoiler tags we would like to adopt it.
Re: NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You'd need a human editor to do all that. Automatically fixing run-on sentences and removing repeated words is possible. Activating passive sentences is challenging; Grammarly gets it wrong all the time, in my experience. Replacing cliches and fixing wordiness would be very challenging without deep linguistic and cultural knowledge. Well I don't know why I was downvoted so heavily. I dont disagree. My goal isn't so…
For that use, I think "proselint", as zx321 recommended, is probably a perfect start, as it references the source of the recommendation. (in terms of cost, though, you can get a decent editor for closer to the ~$300 mark for up ~60k-70k words, but of course if you're not intending on putting in a lot of effort - and more money - to market and sell it, that may well be too much too)
Thanks for mentioning proselint. I just took a quick look and it looks really interesting. Going to give it a try.
Re: NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels
#87Looks fantastic! But, too late for me. I'm writing a novel now in emacs' orgmode (spacemacs) with lots of customization. The killer app for me is orgmode's foldable hierarchies of text. Beyond that even typing speed isn't my main bottleneck, it's ideas and sitting down in front of the keyboard and actually typing.
Here that OP, Foldable Regions ^.
Re: NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels
#88This has no word export option (unless I missed it) which makes it infeasible for a lot of writers. Like it or not, docx is the format a lot of folks in mainstream publishing expect.
Context: My partner is a published author and I've pitched stuff like this at her on multiple occasions as an alternative to Scrivener. In addition to her laughing at my insistence that markdown is a superior way to write, she cites the need for a rock solid word export option that "just works" as a requirement for any tool she uses.
Re: NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scrivener is the novelist standard now isn't it?
Depends what you mean by "standard". It is very widely used, but the closest thing to a standard in the sense of something needed for interoperation is docx.
> standard in the sense of something needed for interoperation is docx
100% this. Word, or docx more specifically, is used for exchanging documents all over the place. It's readable (and writable) by Google Docs, Word, Pages, Open Office, and more I'm not aware of.
I do some proofreading, and I have done typesetting for a novel, and if the inputs I get are not in a Google Doc, it's in docx file.
Re: NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels
#90Great idea, great design! As I think markdown is good only for write simple texts (AND NOT FOR ADVANCED BLOGGING), a novel writing software would to be a choice; because authors don't use richer text format than markdown, as Nick mentioned.
Markdown is pretty good for advanced blogging if you use it as a superset of HTML, as originally intended.[1] That way you get simple syntax for the stuff you're likely to use most often and can still implement more complex formatting when you need to.
[1]: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html