Scrivener 3 is on the way…

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Posted by Dellu
Dec 5, 2017 at 09:07 AM

kind of Kanban…

Posted by Hugh
Dec 5, 2017 at 10:53 AM

Pierre Paul Landry wrote:
Hugh wrote:
>> My loss was simpler; one moment I was able to edit my work, the next
>moment it was gone, and gone for good.
> >My precious work always goes to a Dropbox folder. Even with the free
>account, you get 30 days of automatic backups, every version easily
>accessible, flawlessly !
> >Pierre

Yes, nowadays I also keep files I’m working on now in Dropbox and iCloud (but more for convenience than for security). And since that day in 2007 I’ve kept a regularly-updated, bootable clone of my hard disk (via SuperDuper) on a desktop NAS that I exchange for a second one held 60 miles away every couple of months. In the last five years or so, I’ve also used Time Machine to back up to a second partition on the NASes (giving me versions as well as the clone), and separately backed up my whole disk to a Backblaze account I share with my wife. I back up my laptop to my desktop, and my tablet and ‘phone to iCloud. And I still don’t trust Word!
>

Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 5, 2017 at 01:51 PM

bobmclain wrote:
>This is very strange, and makes me wonder what version of Word you’re
>using and on what computer. I’m not familiar with the EndNote add-on -
>but many of the books I publish don’t require footnotes or endnotes, and
>those that do rarely exceed a couple hundred of them (which Word
>accommodates quite nicely, with no crashes or slow loading/saving). The
>placement of files from Word to Adobe InDesign is pretty flawless, with
>notes appearing as they should, Word styles translated to InDesign
>styles, etc.

It could be down to the specific use case (PhD dissertations) rather than the version of Word and EndNote, as these sorts of problems are confirmed by my PhD students who all end up complaining about the formatting of PhD dissertations in Word (and they use newer versions from mine - I’m still on Office 2010).

We are talking about 300+ page documents, with 50+ images, dozens of tables, hundreds of EndNote references, which could refer to 1000+ citations within the text itself, a dozen headings and sub-headings in each chapter (10+ chapters), with lots of page breaks and section breaks with landscape and portrait orientations, up to 100MB file sizes, depending on the image sizes within.

The key issues are that once the Word document grows to that size and complexity, operations slow down considerably, the application often hangs, and most annoyingly, previous formatting changes get overruled by Word, or the document reflows the text unexpectedly, needing to keep revising the page breaks, heading formatting etc. It just gets very touchy. Every formatting change seems to have a knock-on effect. While EndNote could take some of the blame, it’s probably not the only culprit.

It seems to me that part of the problem is that in a heavily formatted document conflicts develop within Word’s own style markups, which are invisible to the user, but in the background they start conflicting and overriding each other.

My solution to this is to leave the formatting in Word to the very end, and do all outlining, writing etc. in other software (which I prefer anyway).

Another solution could be to learn LaTeX and use Lynx or something like that. But it didn’t seem worthwhile to do for me, as I’m not planning to write another PhD thesis or a book anytime soon (7-10k word journal articles are the standard in my field).

Posted by J J Weimer
Dec 5, 2017 at 04:00 PM

> Another solution could be to learn LaTeX and use Lynx or something like that. But it didn’t seem worthwhile to do for me, as I’m not planning to write another PhD thesis or a book anytime soon (7-10k word journal articles are the standard in my field).

FWIW, journal articles in the 7-10k range are just the right length to learn LaTeX. I would not go as far as my colleague who mostly insists that our undergrad engineers must do their technical reports using LaTeX. OTOH, this has improved the student’s document formats noticeably, and for anything with equations, I would throw Word and its cousins out the window at the outset. Also, as this is in a thread on Scrivener, the utility of Scrivener for non-technical writing may be just as good if not better than LaTeX.

—
JJW

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