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Comment by akeck | Hacker News Reader

Those here who write, do you use plain text with source control? If so, what's your work flow?

Markdown, vim and git, plus spreadsheets for notes and The Plan (list of scenes, etc). Wrote some scripts that use pandoc to take the markdown files and generate both epub files for the Kindle version and OpenOffice files that I later save as PDF for the print version.

I should write an article about my workflow. From Markdown to Amazon using 100% open source :)

I would like to read that article. :)

Here it is! https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-my-first-nov...

Depends on what I'm writing. For shorter things, I write in Markdown and use, well, anything that writes Markdown; I tend to save things in Dropbox, and don't use real version control. (I do have automatic backups in addition to Dropbox, I should note.) For me, git feels like it would be a bit of overkill; I don't tend to want to go back to interim points in drafts, and if I finish a draft, I save the first version.

For novellas/novels, I write in Scrivener, and make use of both its internal versioning "snapshot" system and occasionally saving versions of the whole document package. And of course that's in Dropbox and backed up and etc. etc.

I got fed up with existing word processors and wrote my own. <plug> http://cowlark.com/wordgrinder </plug>

I do use version control, but unfortunately it uses binary files which don't diff; I'm still thinking about that one. (The program simply serialises its entire internal state to disk, which has all kinds of advantages, except for that one.) Luckily my writing workflow doesn't involve backtracking much so I've never really needed it, but I need to come up with something in case I do.

Doesn't that make it really hard to maintain back-compatibility against old save files?

I start out in google docs because it's convenient and the change history is nice to have. I do this instead of plain text because I like adding some formatting as I write. If the book gets over 200 pages (or thereabouts) google docs starts to have problems and then I switch over to Pages on OSX. There, I save edits to google drive as I go. When it comes to (self) publishing time, I actually end up typesetting in word (for print) because it's the easiest, least horrible tool for that (though still horrible). HTML for kindle.

Evernote -> git/plain text

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