flips wrote:On a side-note: I have Ulysses licence as well, why do you prefer it?
I seem to have Ulysses 2.1, but version 3 is out, it seems.
I think back then I went for Scrivener, as I needed to work with RTF both import and export. And I think Ulysses only works with plaintext/markdown? (Which might be fine for just writing from scratch.)
Yes Ulysses is a plain text editor with minimalist markup. It does indeed work fine for just writing from scratch but you cannot import RTF into it as you could with Scrivener.
Personally I find Ulysses to be a truly great writing environment. I really like the minimalist markup. I think that as long as the markup is truly minimal then it is nicer to write with than putting in styles.
With the minimalist markup you are always applying styles in a consistent syntactical way. This means that on export you set the actual style and it will be consistent throughout the document.
Ulysses III is a totally rewritten application and works with iCloud.
There is I believe a weakness in the Scrivener design, but I will say immediately that Nisus Writer is the "cure" for that weakness.
With Scrivener you have RTF documents managed in a package. However Scrivener has no global management of styles in those documents. TextEdit (which Scrivener uses as the editor for each document) does have definable styles but these will not update all the documents in the Scrivener package.
If you decide at the beginning of your writing project to emphasise bits of text with, say italic, then later you change to doing this with an underline, in Scrivener you will not be able to update all the earlier italic to underline. I find that with longer writing projects I do change the styles used, often because I decide to use them for something else.
With Ulysses this is not an issue because you set up a markup for emphasis such as, *emphasis* and when you export you decide how the emphasised text is to be styled. Even if you decide to change the markup midway through your project you can do this with find/replace in Ulysses.
The issue I have raised with Scrivener is eased by simply using Nisus Writer as the word processor to export to because Nisus Writer has attribute sensitive searching. So when you export with Scrivener it is pretty easy to go through the document with Nisus Writer's search and resolve any styling inconsistencies and of course you can also apply dynamically updating styles in Nisus Writer at that stage.
Personally during the writing period I do like to apply the styles as (minimalist) markup and not be thinking about what the actual style should be.
I think that the best word processor to use with Scrivener or Ulysses is Nisus Writer because it is so good at cleaning up any problems that might arise from exporting from those programs.
