NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels | Hacker News Reader

NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels

novelwriter.io

369 pointsapp4soft270 comments

This 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.

Just to add here, the question is not “is markdown (or tex or binary strings or...) better”, but “can the person who determines whether I get paid open the file?”

The fiction publishing world is cutthroat competitive. Trying to use nonstandard tools / “breaking the mold” adds even more friction to success.

I will find out the answer to this question hopefully later this year. :-)

But anyway, I do use Markdown and I have submitted to contests etc. that require Word formatted files. For the most part it's an nonissue. I can use Pandoc to export to Word, provide the reference file with the correct format, and boom, I'm done. None of the judges of my works so far have ever had any issues opening my files.

I agree the publishing industry will never accept Markdown. That's ok. I can use the tools I like and still produce what they need to do their part of the job.

I agree, and I draft my own fiction in emacs. The cost is lower to use my preferred editor, then do the post-hoc formatting adjustments once in Word.

For a novelist, though, the editing process is quite iterative: make changes, send them to your editor, they send it back with comments and inline track changes and so on.

Don't get me wrong, I'm an advocate for using tools you're most comfortable with...whatever gets you writing! But these small things can throw a wrench in the process. It sure sucks to have to do edits in Word!

Good luck with the publishing project, though, it sounds like you're pretty far along!

Unrelated, but what do you write? (Feel free to contact me on Keybase if you prefer, username is in profile.)

I'm an author and an software engineer. I can see why Markdown could be slightly better for a writer - but not much better - and honestly it seems like a step down for an editor.

Primarily, all a writer does is write plain text. Probably less than 1% of sentences are anything other than plain text.

There's not a lot of headings or titles. There's not a lot of italics or bold text.

What else is there? What am I missing? What's the benefit?

You just sold everyone on markdown. This is the whole point. All the crap MS Word adds to support formatting and visual styles is in the way. With markdown you focus on the actual text. Exactly what an author should want to.

What exactly does MS Word add over markdown which matters to an author? I am talking about the writing experience. You could always export to docx.

A table of contents you don't have to manually maintain. Built-in interface to insert special characters you can't type with the keyboard. Automatic grammar checks. Auto-corrections. Macros. All of the above in one program instead of a hodge-podge of programs. Being able to send and receive documents from people with no conversion needed.

No offense but you don't sound like someone who writes a lot?

"What does MS Word offer over Markdown" isn't a good question, because they're not the same thing -- Word is a program and Markdown is a file type. There's nothing that stops a Markdown-based editor from having a full set of features. I've very rarely felt that I was missing out on features when using iA Writer or Ulysses compared to a word processor, although occasionally I wished for either the kind of document juggling that Scrivener is so good at or actual full-blown text editor features like BBEdit. But I haven't reached for an old school word processor as my first choice as a composition tool in... probably 15 years. And I definitely do write a lot.

The most obvious WYSIWYG competitor for novelWriter is Scrivener, which is similar to Ulysses -- and also shares the limitation that it can only export to Word rather than import. Nevertheless, its testimonials page is filled with praise from people who arguably write more than I do. :)

Writing a table of contents is my formatters job, not mine. It takes place after both my editor and my proofreader have completed their jobs, at which point I don't touch the file any more. If you format your own, then you're already in an small niche.

Some people may need "special characters" they can't type, but I have keybindings for the characters I use.

Grammar checking and corrections is my proofreaders job, not mine. It happens after I've converted my document and sent it off.

Macros are supported in pretty much every editor I've ever used for plain-text. I use lots of macros, but exactly zero of them for my novels.

I don't need to send and receive documents with no conversion needed. I do one export when I'm done with my first draft, and then I edit and do one more export before handing it over to my proofreader. Then, sure, I review those changes in Librewriter. The proportion of my time that takes is tiny. It'd be nice not to have to, but I'd take that over having to work in a word processor during writing any day.

> No offense but you don't sound like someone who writes a lot?

As someone who has written several novels, that's how your comment came across to me. At the same time I know novelists range from the pen and paper type (e.g. Gaiman, King to give two examples discussed in this thread) up to wanting word processors with all bells and whistles - it's very much down to taste.

* Table of contents: solved by Pandoc.

* Inserting special characters: personally I don't find those "character choosing" windows to be very convenient. Hunt and peck is a slow way to type! Anyway, you can do this in Markdown with either Unicode (if you have the right keyboard) or you can write HTML escape codes (&tm; etc.)

* Automatic (grammar/spelling). I don't like check as I type, but sure. Anyway, Emacs provides this if I want it.

* Macros. Hello? Emacs? (Also, Pandoc has a scripting interface.)

I may not be published yet but I've written my own book. I've also published books for other people. I did both of those with a Markdown-based toolchain. It works.

Edit: Just to prove the point: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0692553916 . Go see for yourself how the book is formatted.

The "inserting special characters" one is a bit of a "eh?" for most of us Mac users, I think, since most special characters can be typed using the Option key and the character chooser (which is indeed not very convenient!) is system-wide and should work in a native build of at least the GUI version of Emacs. But, yep -- Markdown and Word aren't the same categories of things. How comfortable your Markdown editing experience is depends on how comfortable your Markdown editor is.

(Also, I wrote a Markdown-to-ePub script, too! Although I don't think anything I've got up online uses it anymore.)

pandoc, emacs, and scripting are _not_ a realistic option for most writers. They're writers, not programming geeks.

I'm a Markdown fan, but really there _are_ better solutions for book writing that maintain the ease that Markdown brings. Things like ASCIIDoc.

And in emacs, you can insert essentially any Unicode character with `C-x 8 RET`...add swiper and you're off to the races :)

Also, if emacs was good enough for Neal Stephenson, I'm sold...though I hear he uses Scrivener now!

Why would I want to write my first draft in a different tool than my subsequent drafts? Nobody cares about visual styles, but my editor sends back their thoughts with inline edits and comments in Word. It's so much easier to edit in Word. I'm a huge Markdown fan, but it raises the question:

What does Markdown get me that makes it worth switching to for the first draft only?

Many writers intentionally separate tooling to force workflows, even at the point of great inconvenience if it provides for an environment they feel is more conducive to writing. This is generally far more important than whether or not getting it into a format that editors can work with is extra effort or not.

Hemingway famously favoured pencils for his first draft and switched to typewriter for his second.

Gaiman and Stephen King uses pens for at least their first drafts. Gaiman expressly for the reason that he believes it force him to be more thoughtful and forces him to go back and rewrite the full book word for word rather than going back and forth to edit. King switched to pens after his car accident.

JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter with pen on loose sheaf paper.

Writing novels is intensely personal, to the point where writers will insist on specific brands of pens or specific models of typewriters. E.g. Danielle Steele has used 1946 Olympia's throughout her entire career.

i am probably the wrong person to respond because the reason i prefer a plain text editor is that that's what i have been using for all my work until now.

i am not yet there in the process, but i won't be using plain text/markdown just for the first draft.

when i get back that word documents with comments from the editor, i'll look at that like a read-only copy, and actually make the required edits in that same plain text editor.

while it may be easier to make edits right in place in the word document, it is easier (for me at least) to keep a history of changes with plain text documents.

otherwise i'd agree with you. if you are going to end up editing in word, may as well start with editing in word. for me the goal is to avoid using word/libreoffice at all.

From your parent's comment, I think this is the key statement:

> what an author should want

That is normative / prescriptive attitude, and seems to gatekeep who gets called "an author."

On the other hand, I think the biggest challenges most writers have is getting words on (digital) paper, regardless of the software.

I am also unconvinced that there are any practical benefits (for me) to using Markdown in particular, instead of whatever is closest to hand and offers the least friction...use what works for you!

MS Word does add word processing. E.g. your straight quotes will be contextually converted to the correct left/right quote, your hyphens can become em-dashes, etc.

Ha! This is a really interesting perspective—I think you're saying, "it's all plain text, so there's no advantage to using Markdown instead of docx".

I think others have an opposite view, but on the same grounds. The argument seems to be: it's all plain text, so docx is overkill, so markdown is more technically efficient!

There's some benefit to using the tool I know best (emacs, for me), so it's nice to use a "native" format that also gives me my usual keybindings, macros, etc.

But there's no doubt it just offloads the inefficiency to a different step of the process. I'm more comfortable with inputting text, but it requires post-hoc reformatting, and I'd have to use a different word processor for post-editor changes...

The "markdown is a more efficient solution from a technical perspective" argument doesn't hold a lot of weight with me...the practical overhead of docx is minimal, so unless you prize technical purity over all else, I don't think there _is_ a benefit.

The benefit is the rest of the pure text toolchain. Like being able to use Git. I can confirm, for example, how long a typo has existed in my book by looking at the Git history. Maybe that's a bit academic, but you get the point. I have the complete history of everything I've ever written.

Another example: because formatting is reified in Markdown, I can grep for it. Did I misuse italics? With one command I can find every single place where I used italics in my entire book. I don't think you can even do that in Word. Good luck reading a multi-hundred page manuscript to find all of the places you may have made the same mistake.

Another example: Word provides styles, but honestly, who has discipline to use them? Most people I know manually insert page breaks, centered text, and X number blank spaces at the top of a page to make a new chapter. In Markdown, all of my markup gets converted into Word styles automatically and then I can create a reference doc to apply the style I want. I'm writing semantically correct styles in my documents all the time with no additional effort.

Well, to be fair, MS Word maintains a full history of every edit that was made.

And, find-and-replace for specific formatting is supported out-of-the-box.

Finally, cmd-i / cmd-u / cmd-b are pretty easy default bindings, and setting up shortcuts for more intricate, specific styles is straightforward in Word.

I share your preference for using an efficient tool—I'm a die-hard md+git practitioner. But the "most people I know" argument is not a good basis for rejecting real, rich features in software that works well for other people.

I am also curious: why do you care about semantic correctness? It's OK if that's just your preference, but it's not something that moves the needle for me....I'm not sure why I should care!

(edit to add: my comment sounds glib and a little sharper that I intended. That wasn't my intent!)

I think version history doesn't work the way you think. It seems to be supported when you use Microsoft's cloud storage product (which I do not use):

> Version history in Office only works for files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint in Microsoft 365.

> https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/view-previous-ver...

Or alternatively you can sort of hack it with track changes, but it's not automatic and there is a long list of caveats. In short, track changes is really intended for a single round of changes on top of a base document, not for permanently tracking the changes on a document over its entire lifetime:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/view-previous-ver...

Now maybe a Word expert will come along and tell me how to do it properly. :-) But even if they do that sort of proves my point, which is that Word is a large, complex piece of software and even if it hypothetically supports some feature, doesn't make it intuitive or easy to use in that way. (Or that you won't hit a bunch of corner cases when you try to use it.)

I do stand corrected about the find-replace formatting, so thanks for that. But on the other hand, I don't think it really contradicts my point either.

To be clear, I do think Word serves its user base! For low- to moderate- tech savvy users, it's does exactly what it needs to. And I'm not saying everyone should switch to Markdown. But for those of us who have the technical chops to go beyond it, there are some real advantages to working with other tools that shouldn't be discounted.

Well said! Though, I would say that this statement is a good description of git, too:

> a large, complex piece of software and even if it hypothetically supports some feature, doesn't make it intuitive or easy to use in that way. (Or that you won't hit a bunch of corner cases when you try to use it.)

A takeaway I get from this entire conversation is that the real pain point is not the drafting stage, but the editing stage. The latter is (a) collaborative, with (b) non-technical stakeholders...there doesn't seem to be a good way to both use my favorite editor, AND play nicely w my editor's stack (or lack thereof).

Good thing I don't have an editor...that would require me to actually write things :D

> MS Word maintains a full history of every edit that was made

This is only true while track changes is on, correct? Like can I see the state of a docx as I was writing it last month/year?

I don't use Word so I can't say!

But if you cared about the history, why wouldn't you always turn them on by default? "Full history" in git is also an opt-in model for maintaining a history...

I write books in Vim. The way I work is that I do it all in plaintext until the final edit. Only after that do I add formatting (could be .docx or Markdown or whatever the editor expects).

What happens when your editor requests changes? How are those edits communicated to you, and how do you integrate them back into plaintext?

(Serious question—a big pain point for me is the choice between using my preferred tool to start, then switching to a bad tool later; or, using a bad tool the entire time)

All edits in plaintext on both sides until the final draft. Yes, I know this isn't the standard way of doing things but it isn't so much because I'm a Vim cultist or anything. It's only because I can yank, insert, and navigate the text so much faster than with something like Pages, MS Word, or Scrivener.

Another way that seems to work well for some writers and editors is a shared Google Doc.

This sounds silly but as an author myself it's extremely important that I know what the story looks like to a final reader while I write it. It's like dogfooding my own prose. Too many short paragraphs, or too many long ones, or strange gaps, etc. are much more evident to me in docx or scrivener or any other text processor.

I could never get over Markdown; Markdown doesn't show me the user experience of my own code(writing), while word and scrivener will show me instantly.

My favourite talk on this topic is "Emacs for writers": https://youtu.be/FtieBc3KptU

If you are working with plain text, use something that excels at working with text. I saw another of his talks, and how he works in Emacs is amazing.

Consider a book like The Lord of the Rings. It has gone through countless revisions and corrections. With markdown and git you could track those changes and corrections over time.

Yes, you or I could...but Tolkien was much busier writing and world-building, and I seriously doubt George Allen & Unwin (the publishers) would have acceded to conditions on how the manuscript was sent to them!

Also - doesn't MS Word have revision history?

Geez 99.99% of a Nobel is just plain text. MS Word adds no value. Getting plain text into MS Word is not rocket science.

The point of using markdown is that you got many tools which are superior is aiding in you writing process and organizing your text.

The final format is much less important than whatever aids your writing process.

I have tried using traditional word processors for writing novels and I cannot say they measure up to tools like Ulysses.

> MS Word adds no value.

Word automates a lot of things in the editing cycle of a novel. Word's "Track Changes"/"Accept Changes" tools and the workflows they enable are by far the most common in a number of industries, but especially in edit workflows of most major publishers. That's why the Word format specifically is often requested/required, because people know and understand those tools and already have processes/workflows built around them.

The closest equivalent tools for plain text are source control systems and text diff/patch. Those tools are great (and arguably fit some definitions of "superior", especially in capturing history earlier in the process and keeping history longer after the process). They are also nowhere as ubiquitously installed as Word, and nowhere near as easily taught (or already known/understood) as Word in today's world.

Those "edit cycle" needs maybe aren't a huge reason to do the initial writing in Word, but they are certainly many steps above "no value", and thus the noted restriction that no matter what tool you use for the initial writing, if it doesn't have an easy Word export to get it started down the edit cycle path then it doesn't have an easy fit in today's publishing world.

I'll tell her to let her editor know that. Lol.

This can be accomplished by exporting to PDF

exporting to pdf is exactly what you don't want as an editor receiving files from a writer.

Unless you're already a big-name author you rarely get to choose. Docx will generally be an option, and if you're lucky a few other formats.

How is a copyeditor supposed to manage a PDF? PDFs are generally a huge no-no in submissions. (Source: I write short fiction & my short fiction has been published.)

I guess their editor can just cut and paste to Word if he really wants to make corrections.

> their editor can just cut and paste to Word if he really wants to make corrections

Is it sarcasm? I mean... make corrections/changes is what an editor does.

Hes, it was sarcasm. A write-only format is the worst way to send a novel to a publisher/editor.

From the documentation:

> The core export format of novelWriter is HTML5. You can also export the entire project as a single novelWriter Markdown-flavour document. In addition, other exports to Open Document, PDF, and plain text is offered through the Qt library, although with limitations to formatting.

So it seems like it can export to Open Document, which seems to be well-supported[1]; including Microsoft Office support.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument#Application_suppo...

If she sends ODT to her publisher or editor, they will laugh at her and throw it in the trash. There are very specific rules about this stuff and no wiggle room for interpretation. It _has_ to be in docx format or it's not getting read.

She's correct. Only a programmer may entertain the idea that editing markdown is superior to any visual editor.

> markdown is a superior way to write

Is it though? I don't have any experience with book authoring but I would expect stuff like Geronimo Stilton to be hard to produce with markdown: it is peppered with creative text highlighting (e.g. words written in a custom cheese-pattern font) and this is common in primary school geared books.

Even decidedly grown-up books like GEB might have illustrations and diagrams, and it's important to consider where said illustrations go - they must fit in a physical page.

There are also other small quality of life things that word does automatically, e.g. replace ASCII 0x22 (keyboard quote) with 0x201C / 0x201D (left and right double quotes, respectively), etc.

Don't get me wrong, I love to use markdown for programming documentation and it's pretty good for that, especially when you adopt flavors like GFM. But I'm legitimately curious what makes one consider markdown superior for book writing. It just seems like it would have a different set of priorities.

I think that House of Leaves can be left as an unaddressed edge-case for most novel-writing tools.

Even ignoring diagrams, etc, there's a reason that like word processing applications are killer apps for personal computing. WYSIWYG is a pretty convincing abstraction!

And yeah, you have the invisible format issue but at least you can make tables and resize them with your mouse.

Markdown's value add comes from having really good implementations to transform it into rich text, and being "unambiguous" (it's not really in a lot of cases but there aren't many great alternatives with widespread implementation).

But like... Word is pretty magical overall.

Coming up with the text and doing the visual layout later are often separate step. And author does not do all the visual layout.

Yes, almost publishers accept Word documents only, and that's why I've built DocxManager (https://docxmanager.com/) on top of Microsoft Word. ;)

Basically, it's an outliner/corkboard/project manager for all kinds writers who uses Word.

Windows only. Bummer. Completely understandable, but bummer. A lot of tools can output .docx files.

I agree with her - markdown is totally not a superior way to write. It's a good way to mark up text, but writing isn't just marking up text.

When writing you want a tool focused specifically on writing an organizing text. Programs like word is too focused on formatting and visual aspects.

Markdown would be much better for authors. Just because they have become accustomed to something else doesn’t mean that something else is better.

Just watching the mess my dad makes when writing books in Word makes me convinced that anybody who claims Word is superior for an author simply have never watched and author in action.

Acknowledge having an inbuilt export would be preferable but for what it’s worth; If you’re a dev it shouldn’t be too hard to leverage pandoc, especially coming from a clean text based format.

Something like:

$ brew install pandoc (install on macOS)

$ pandoc -t docx filename.md -o filename.docx

Ref: https://opensource.com/article/19/5/convert-markdown-to-word...

This is now significantly more steps than downloading Scrivener.

Unless it's got better Scrivener is pretty awful though - bought it for my first book and gave up, both books I've written were written with other tools

Interesting, I've written two novels and over a dozen radio drama series in Scrivener. Currently using it to finish first draft on a spec film script. It's pretty fantastic. Interested to hear why it didn't work for you - especially if the alternative is word.

Cross platform support (including iPad), saving direct to dropbox, full screen distraction free mode, easy sorting of chapters / scenes, rapid offline export to PDF (unlike say Celtex). Scrivener just blows everything else I've used to write out of the water.

What did you use instead?

One was in asciidoc (the publisher's tool of choice), the other was in pages (only a 10,000 word book)

Working draft for current one is in Ulysses but I’m not feeling it ATM so might switch

They're technical books rather than novels so although I prefer markdown I find it doesn't quite stretch far enough for me

However, since NovelWriter is GPLv3 licensed, they could in theory incorporate code from Pandoc, which is GPLv2 licensed, directly into NovelWriter.

I think you guys are missing the point. The point isn’t “how do we get from markdown to docx” but rather “why doesn’t this tool support the format my publisher expects”. Yes, pandoc is amazing, but the product needs to support exporting to docx for the publisher so that the user of NovelWriter feels supported and empowered to write.

TeaDrunk said it best: it’s now significantly more steps the user shouldn’t have to do.

This is the correct take. If it's so easy to do then there should be a button or menu option that does it.

That’s what I am saying. Integrate Pandoc into NovelWriter so that users can export directly to docx.

You and parent commenter seem to think that you are disagreeing with what I said but we are agreeing.

or just use PanWriter: https://panwriter.com/

It can export to ODT or HTML, both of which can be imported into word, or moved over by crudely cut and pasting into Word.

I think the bigger issue if she already likes Scrivener is that if that is the functionality she wants, then unless she wants the flexibility of being able to customise a tool or process Markdown files with code or switch to Linux etc. is something she wants, then it's not likely the tools you've pitched, or this one, will be an improvement.

I write in Markdown myself, so I absolutely sympathise with your POV on that, but I think the "rock solid word export" is more of a way to get you off her back because it works.

You also need a way to import changes from edits. Word's track changes feature is vital in professional contexts, even though it is not always intuitive. Once a manuscript gets to the editing stage, tracking revisions, comments, suggestions, etc is extremely important. I suppose at that stage, you could just move away from a tool like this, and just use Word, or Google Docs.

Trying to unseat Scrivener is like competing with IntelliJ.

Ok, we're going down the hole of analogies a little too far but VS Code and the world of language services is a pretty decent replacement for a lot of use cases outside of IntelliJ's core Java strength.

Every top dog eventually gets cut down by _someone_ over time.

Scrivener does in fact have competition. (Highland 2 for screenwriting for example.)

As a competitor to Scrivener, I'd love to know why you think that.

(I just deleted a paragraph of text so that I don't influence your response with my own opinions.)

I applaud the author for keeping everything text file based.

In general, I think we should strive for non-proprietary, standard file formats.

Isn't docx far too one-sided and controlled in that regard? I wonder if anyone has some info on the "state of affairs" for the "document format race".

None of this matters because the industry relies on docx (and it's a crusty, oldschool industry so good luck changing that).

A minimum for a novel writing tool is that one can actually send the novel out in a format where your agent and editor will read it. Otherwise you're not getting that novel published.

If we're being fair, docx (or rather, tools that write docx files) offers a lot of tooling out of the box that is useful for proofreaders, editors, and typesetters. Revision history, suggestions, and non-printing comments are all incredibly useful.

This is correct. Any writing software that aims for an audience larger than HN needs to have a very robust docx export capability.

My partner tells me that it has to be formatted a certain way down to the font and line spacing too or they won't accept it.

I'm cracking up at all these comments suggesting that her recipients brew install pandoc lol. Good luck with that.

Depends on what industry… O'Reilly relies on Asciidoc

I see you hate the Unix philosophy....for conversions use pandoc. A Song of Ice and Fire was not written with Word.

> A Song of Ice and Fire was not written with Word.

When startups haven't even started up yet but are worrying about how they can scale to billion-dollar unicorn level, a common refrain on Hacker News has been "you are not Google."

Allow me to give you the fiction writers' equivalent: you are not George R.R. Martin.

The output is md....dont you think you can convert that too let's say docx? You don't even have to be Google todo that.

And if you want to let it proof read by George R.R. Martin you can even convert it to WordStar....magic eh? Pandoc can do that...your MS Word too?

You're missing the point that people are trying to make here.

Yes, it's possible to convert Markdown to a Word file, with a variety of tools. You can use Pandoc to do this if you are the sort of person who is comfortable using tools like Pandoc. I can do that, along with all sorts of other things, because I am that sort of nerd.

However, most fiction writers and editors are not that sort of nerd. Most people don't want to use Markdown in the first place. Of the people who do want to use Markdown, not all of them are that sort of nerd, either. They want an "Export to > DOCX" command in their editor, not "save the Markdown file, open your terminal app, change to your documents directory, and type "pandoc -o my-novel.docx my-novel.md". (And that's assuming they're not doing something like, well, what NovelWriter does, saving individual chapters and perhaps even individual scenes as independent files.)

Look, I love Pandoc. It's great. But it's not a tool for everyone. If someone is trying to embrace the plain text lifestyle with a tool like NovelWriter but pointing out not being able to export to a Word file is a problem for them, asking "are you comfortable with Unix command line tools" and then telling them about Pandoc if they say yes might be a great idea -- but starting out with "obviously you hate the Unix way", maybe not so much.

> you can even convert it to WordStar....magic eh? Pandoc can do that.

No, in fact it cannot. :)

> (And that's assuming they're not doing something like, well, what NovelWriter does, saving individual chapters and perhaps even individual scenes as independent files.)

This is totally unrelated to the gist of this thread, but I just wanted to point out that novelWriter's project builder outputs to a single file, which can be markdown, ODF, PDF, HTML, and others. Pandoc could then make a single DOCX file out of that.

Your point still stands that this is too complicated for the average user, but I just wanted to mention this since it might make a difference for technically minded writers considering novelWriter.

That makes sense (I figured novelWriter did that, since it looks an awful lot like an attempt at a Markdown-based answer to Scrivener and that's how Scrivener's "Compile" function works), and I suspect it won't be too difficult for novelWriter to add other file formats to its exporter. So not being able to output DOCX is probably not a long-term issue, unless the maintainers have a philosophical objection to it. :)

First, your probably right and i may/really have missed the point.

Second...it really cant.

Shame on me, and sorry for my tone.

How are you going to handle editor comments without losing history?

When you too can afford to pay your editors, proofreaders, and publishers to accommodate your unique file formats and the associated changes to their workflow, you too can write in WordStar.

Since you obvious don't know what unix philosophy is, it's a md writer..that's it, you want to convert it..take a converter like pandoc. If you really think every writing program should have it's own converters..well then you end up with less interchangeable stuff. One tool for Writing another one for conversion..is that so complicated?

For a layman, err, editor? Absolutely. It's a completely different workflow than what they're used to.

The Unix philosophy has nothing to do with this, since we're not talking about programming, we're talking about writing.

>since we're not talking about programming

Has nothing todo with programming, a real hammer is better as the backside of an axe. A Specialized Knife is better then a Swiss-Pocket Knife. One tool for one job but make that job perfect.

Ever see a framer’s axe? It’s one part axe, one part hammer. It’s perfect for framers - they love it. It’s one tool which lets them chop, modify, remove nails, hammer in nails, whatever they need to do, without having to carry 4-5 different tools.

The idea that a specialized tool is always better than a multi-tasking tool is simply not true. One must only look at the popularity and utility of leatherman multi-tools to see this to be true.

Even in programming circles, one needs only to look at how many options there are for ‘ls’ to see that “one tool for one purpose” is not always the best thing.

>The idea that a specialized tool is always better than a multi-tasking tool is simply not true.

It is hence the name specialized, but if you have to live with a all-round tool then that whats you have.

>one needs only to look at how many options there are for ‘ls’ to see that “one tool for one purpose” is not always the best thing.

The gnu or the bsd one ;)

If you have an editor, you need two way communication -- they are going to make changes in your word document, using track changes, so you also need to be able to convert back.

To be fair, docx is non-proprietary. And as an ISO standard, it is a very standard format.

Infeasible is maybe a stretch. However you will need to have a multi-step "Export for Publish" workflow which is definitely a hurdle. However assuming that 95% of the time is spent writing it may be worth it if you like the tool.

The hardest part of writing a novel is definitely not converting it to docx. I can't even express how crazy this discussion sounds. It's like people who post on writer's forums about how they have an idea for a novel and ask what the best way to get it published is.

Docx might be an appropriate format to communicate with a publisher. But to my very limited knowledge Markdown is a good choice for the initial authoring process. As it can easily be converted. These days publishing happens on all sorts of platforms and the end product needs to be prepared for the press, ePub, Kindle, PDF, audiobooks, etc.

Until the distribution is decided my intuition is that Markdown provides this needed flexiblity.

Use pandoc to export or transform it (if you can).

it says it can exporting to ODF, but without much formatting requiring additional editing after conversion. instead it recommends exporting to HTML, and then importing that into writer or word for better results.

but i could not tell from the docs how to get the end result into something like standard manuscript format without manual processing.

found the answer: http://www.autodidacts.io/convert-markdown-to-standard-manus...

should be easy to implement using pandoc since the underlying code is python?

Screenshots: https://novelwriter.readthedocs.io/en/stable/int_introductio...

From the main page (https://novelwriter.io):

novelWriter is a Markdown-like text editor designed for writing novels and larger projects of many smaller plain text documents. It uses its own flavour of Markdown that supports a meta data syntax for comments, synopsis, and cross-referencing between files. It's designed to be a simple text editor that allows for easy organisation of text files and notes, built on plain text files for robustness.

Looks really good. Like a simplified version of Scrivener, which is awesome. Would be awesome if I can import it to Scrivener and the other way around.

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.

The standard, as in what novelists enjoy writing, a software to enhance the writing experience.

Not really that either, honestly. I know/have heard a lot of writers who just use Word for that, too, Brandon Sanderson for one. Scrivener is widespread and well-loved, but it's very optional.

Somewhat. However, their manuscript → markdown export has issues. I have seen people struggling with the flavor of its markdown a bit as well.

OP has a great solution that focuses on markdown alone. And that's a welcome change!

Homepage: https://novelwriter.io

Message to HN Mods: Please, replace actual topic link to news article link[0]

[0] https://novelwriter.io/2021/01/03/release-1-0/

In cases where a project hasn't been discussed on HN before, which it appears this one hasn't, we change the link to the project home page. I've changed it to that from https://github.com/vkbo/novelWriter/releases/tag/v1.0 now.

Thanks!

Outside 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 text editing entirely in favor of markdown simply because it's easy to implement. I am definitely tired of seeing my writing littered with a detritus of special characters when it's never going to get exported to anything other than text.

I'm using Papyrus Autor because I write in German [1,2]. It's expensive but superior to everything else for the German language. They're expanding to English users, but only offer a super-expensive subscription model for them [3]. If I wrote novels in English, I'd probably use Scrivener [4].

I'm very familiar with markdown, pandoc, and LaTeX, but none of these are relevant or important for writing novels. As a novelist, you need grammar and style correction features, pinboards for ideas, databases for characters and sources form the Net, easy snip management, advanced typography (especially quote correction and automatic quote conversion), name generators, non-continuous selections, selection by font, search & replace of formatting, automatic backups over network and advanced data integrity features, excellent ebook and PDF export, different views for writing/editing/correcting, etc.

[1] https://www.papyrus.de/ [2] https://talumriel.de/ [3] https://www.papyrusauthor.com/ [4] https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview

It's interesting to see differences in desired features here, because I'm currently writing my third novel, and ditched my previous editors because I realised I needed basically no features - I need a clean canvas without distractions, and ability to do some basic tagging for cross-references. That's it. So now I'm writing in my own editor, in windows with nothing but the text - not even a menu or title bar - and literally not a single one of the features you list.

Some of it because I don't want to focus on it while writing and/or because it's something my editor or proofreader handles (grammar and style correction, typography, selection by font, search & replace of formatting, ebook export). Some of it because I'd rather pick and choose separate tools (name generators, backups, data integrity). Some because I've never had a use for it (pinboards, character databases beyond a folder of plain text files by name, snip management).

To be clear, I'm not at all disputing that these features can be useful or essential for you. I just find it fascinating how different our expectations are.

There's room for a lot of very different editors for the writers market, as people have very strong and contradictory ideas about what you need... The UI for Papyrus Autor looks like something I might have nightmares about, for example...

You can define arbitrary work views in Papyrus Autor, including distraction-free fullscreen mode, and there are plenty of reasonable "view" templates to chose from, too. It even has a special "typewriter mode" scrolling. I don't want to advertise the expensive subscription (don't think it's really worth it), but this program has been sold commercially since the 80s for a reason.

It does seem like a fantastic tool for those who want more functionality. I'm absolutely not surprised there's a market for it - as I said, there's clearly a huge span in terms of what writers want.

You can use zettlr.

Thanks for the suggestion, but zettlr has too much UI for my taste. I use an editor I've written myself, with no UI at all by default.

> I'm using Papyrus Autor because...

Proprietary?!

And?

You know a better tool that does the work?

> You know a better tool that does the work?

Yep, KIT Scenarist.[0]

[0] https://github.com/dimkanovikov/KITScenarist

Not even remotely...

I'm close to 60,000 words into my latest novel and I'm writing in Ulysses using Markdown.

Novels, in particular, rarely need more than headings and occasional italics or boldface.

Funnily enough, a lot of the work I've interacted with has been in the Lit RPG genre - which needs a lot more, since they're often including tables of "character data", not to mention "system" fonts. It's surprisingly challenging to typeset and make it broadly readable across devices.

I’m just getting into making RPGs and I was using Joplin. Switched to Zettlr for the linking and file folder == a project paradigm. What are you using? I was hoping to use the PHP based command line tool Ibis to convert to PDF but in order to auto-generate a table of contents I’d need to have way too much white space after each section. Ideally I could change the output formatting with a CSS file.

As an avid LitRPG reader, i can tell you most authors need to scale their system WAY back. I like the crunchy parts, but at the end of the day story should take the focus, not 10 page long stat tables. Either that, or there's just enough crunch to slap a litrpg label on a bucket of cliche fantasy tropes.

> most authors need to scale their system WAY back

Oh, no doubt. I've seen entire chapters devoted to "character evolutions" and the associated spew of repetitive skills/character sheets.

What I personally like is when there's a secondary resource (aka a wiki) which tracks changes to the various character sheets and skills over time. Perhaps this could be done within the novel by using appendices? Wouldn't help extensively with Patreon-based web novels, sadly.

All that said, litrpg - not to mention software development books, cookbooks, etc - do still need these kinds of extended typesetting resources.

how do you convert from markdown to standard manuscript format?

starting to write in markdown or even plain text is fine, but once the first draft is submitted to the editor or sent to a publisher for consideration it usually needs to be a word or rtf document in standard manuscript format.

once converted i am stuck using libreoffice to revise and edit the story.

i found tools that convert from markdown to ODF (which i can then load and export as word) but i have not found any way to apply a standard manuscript style in the conversion process.

without that i'd have to manually reformat the document each time i want to submit a new revision.

Saw this comment a bit late. Ulysses has good conversion capabilities. It's easy to get whatever format I need.

FWIW, I've been using Vellum for formatting my indie published novels, and would happily use it again if this new work is indie.

I tried out and one issue I had was with indented paragraphs. I ended up using LibreWriter's regex search replace to remove all the extraneous newlines.

can you describe the complete process you use to convert your documents?

I only gave it a try for a chapter or two just to get a feel for what might be involved. I first tried pandoc. This mostly worked, except for the indentation of paragraphs. I took care of that by setting up LibreOffice's paragraph indentation, and used LibreOffice's search replace to remove the (now) extraneous new lines.

My recommendation is to grab a decently long markdown document and give it a try.

i found an answer to this question here: http://www.autodidacts.io/convert-markdown-to-standard-manus...

I also use Ulysses and very happy with it (except for it being a subscription based product).

The feature that I would miss the most by switching to novelWriter or another open source solution would be the following:

- auto cloud sync across all devices (I can even write on my phone if I think of something while waiting for the bus)

- print quality output in PDF and epub with a single click (and many available themes to choose from).

- nice eye pleasing UI that put me in the right mood for writing

- good integration with my third party writing assistance software (Antidote).

"auto cloud sync across all devices"

hmmm - if it is an editor that handles text files, then myself, I would rely on one of the myriad of sync tools/platforms available, rather than have someone else's implementation

True and it's actually possible to use any tools you want as it supports local directories of markdown files (I use git to version my writing) but the product does not target at a technical audience but writers in general and their cloud sync is pretty well implemented. I like their cloud sync for the ability to sync with ios devices without doing anything in particular.

syncthing is the tool i use for that now

I use Ghostwriter, it's free. I write in a directory that is continuously synced to Dropbox. And I write in pandoc flavored markdown, so a single script can spit out compiled PDF or epub.

I've wanted to try it as it looks pretty slick but it's apparently "a [...] Markdown editor for Windows and Linux". Not much of an help if you are using macOS.

I would be interested to know why you choose "Ulysses" and not "Odysseus"?

ps. I followed a conversation about James Joyce novel which was hinted that there is a difference between the two names and Joyce didn't pick "Ulysses" randomly. I'd like to know if you went through the same process.

UPDATE: Ok, I mis-read the comment, I though the name of the Novel was Ulysses, apparently it is an app.

It's a writing-focused word processor for MacOS and iOS.

https://ulysses.app/

Which moved to subscription model and lost me completely. After trying Scrivener, I realised that for my needs is overkill, moved to something that I know will not bite me in the future: Folder organisation plus Vim - Org mode. Adobe in their infinite greed ruined propriety software model for all. SaaS is pure hell.

Thanks for pointing that out!

That's the kind of need for text manipulation I would expect of a typical writer. Hence why bother with markdown at all (unless it's the only thing available). Rich text is a much cleaner solution for that. Markdown really shines when it comes to text that has to be formatted just so for web layout. e.g. tables, bullets, multi-headings and linking.

Because it's not a bother. It's pretty much just plain text.

And having it as plain text means adding your own special annotations is easy. E.g. I'm writing my third novel in my own editor using Markdown, and key for me was that it was easy to write small little scripts to e.g. process front-matter with similar "@pov" tags etc. to let me trivially cross-reference things.

Markdown absolutely does not shine when it comes to tables, at the very least. Unless you're using a variation of the 'standard', of course.

Markdown is "rich text". What distinction are you trying to draw here?

no it isn't.

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.

>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.

This.

I chose emacs because I'm a programmer who uses emacs frequently. And its just damn text and I don't have to get all fiddly with everything. And like I don't want to have to fiddle around with Word, I don't want to fiddle around with some complicated markup langage like rst either. I just want to write.

I wrote my thesis is Word, I know what it can be like.

Writing a novel is definitely a 'to each, his own' practice.

I can format text all day. It's a huge distraction that allows me to also feel 'productive'; which gets in the way of actually writing. Using a markdown editor lets me do the formatting that is necessary for the work (e.g., italics) without being hugely distracted.

> But it should hide the syntax just like rtf editors do (unless you want to see it).

I'm using Obsidian and wouldn't mind seeing this feature. However, it currently offers the option of toggling quickly between edit and preview modes, or opening up a second view for preview, which can optionally be scroll-locked with the editing window. That works great for me.

I use copious amounts of notes in my fiction writing, that sometimes include mathematical/physical formulas, data, and code. Obsidian supports (various amounts of) inline LaTeX, syntax-highlighting, and mermaid. (I'm also not above abusing these things for my own purposes: I've used mermaid graph to create a quick-and-dirty character family tree for my own reference, for instance.) And, of course, I use markdown to tie all these notes together and to the novel.

> quick-and-dirty character family tree for my own reference

KeenWrite supports inline TeX, Mermaid (via Kroki), R for calculations, and interpolated string variables:

https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite#screenshots

This allows me to create a family tree and, when I change a character's name, the diagram---along with every other reference to their name---is updated automatically. Here's a video showing how it works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_dFd6UhdV8

Thanks for the recommendation! This looks powerful and useful. I will definitely check it out.

Should? According to whom? You? Or the author?

When I write markdown, I don't even see the syntax. All I see is bold, heading, code block.

I don't need to see some on screen typeset version of the text because this all subject to change anyway when it comes to typesetting the document and that will change depending on the medium (ie. book, web, email etc.)

Published novelist.

I use markdown for drafting via the delightfully minimalistic iA Writer. It is useful for first drafts and editing on a sentence by sentence level.

However, it is not really ideal for getting the text into ms format or for organizing and editing something as complex as a finished draft, so I use Scrivener at that end of the process.

I think there probably is no single tool that is ideal at all stages of writing a novel. In the beginning you want something that gets the hell out of your way and lets you write quickly. Once the first draft is done, you need structural editing tools. And during that process you will want to dip into tighter, sentence-by-sentence tooling for rewriting and revising.

I wrote the first draft of my first novel in Vim using Markdown. I've since switched to Scrivener, mostly for the general convenience it offers and especially the mobile apps and syncing, but there is a lot about that old workflow that I miss. It's really convenient to have everything in a single buffer optimized for keyboard-only navigation, and with Pandoc there aren't really any concerns around exporting to .docx.

I absolutely hate WYSIWYG editing when I'm writing fiction, because it's totally unnecessary and only serves to muddy the waters when it's time to export the text, e.g. if some of the devices I was editing on were set to use smart quotes and some weren't. The text of a typical novel doesn't have much going on besides chapters, sections, and paragraphs, so Markdown really has everything you need, and for fancier formatting (like the side-by-side verse paragraphs in Stand on Zanzibar, just to name one example off the top of my head) I get the feeling that Scrivener isn't really flexible enough. There are better tools, like Vellum, and I think traditional rich text editing exists in a sort of uncomfortable middle ground where it offers just enough functionality to get in the way.

But obviously installing and using a command-line utility like Pandoc is not something the typical author can really be expected to do, so they're stuck using the standard industry-favorite tools that do it all from a GUI.

It’s a problem I’ve grappled with for a while. I used to use Scrivener but eventually got tired of its syncing capabilities, as I took a lot of notes on my phone in markdown and wanted an easy way to integrate and transform these notes into longer form pieces. Scrivener does support this, but it’s definitely not the most polished feature of the tool and it kind of clunky and annoying to work with in my opinion.

Tried using vim+git for a while. This combo is great for portability, but my eyes get tired staring at a terminal all day, and while git feels nice, it doesn’t give you huge advantages and is just more work when many GUI tools like scrivener have good enough version control built in — some would probably find a complete git version history useful, and use branches for different drafts etc. but I personally have never needed this and find it’s just another distraction from actually doing the work of writing.

Now that I stare at a screen for several hours a day during my day job, I’ve settled on pen and paper for my own health. No idea yet whether or not I’ll be able to translate this into finished products or if typing out handwritten text will prove too tedious.

I keep seeing references to markdown editors on HN. As a non-tech person it would have never crossed my mind to use something like this to write a novel or even keep notes, but it seems to really strike a chord here. Perhaps it's simply the comfort associated with code over a long period of time?

Part of it might be preference for plain text files with no vendor lock-in.

Or it might be preference for explicitness, we've all fought with rich editors bleeding format from one word into another and struggling to un-format the text at the right location.

To play devil's advocate, ODF is (a) open, and (b) native in Word.

For that matter, docx is an ISO standard.

On the other side, I perpetually have to unformat my hard-wrapped lines, before I paste plain text into eg an email...

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?

pandoc is pretty handy. It's pretty much plain text anyway, whatever format is used.

yup, and here is how to use pandoc to convert to standard manuscript format: http://www.autodidacts.io/convert-markdown-to-standard-manus...

thank you for this.

huh. looks like i bookmarked this article for followup some time ago, and completely forgot about it.

but won't get you all the way there, unfortunately, since novel format is pretty specific.

What are some specific requirements? Aren't most formatting done by the publisher anyway?

publishers format for print, but the submission needs to be in a specific format too.

this stems from the days where manuscripts were submitted on paper, and not electronically. one could argue that with electronic submission such format requirements are no longer relevant, but we all know that people don't like change.

standard manuscript format looks roughly like this:

lines are double spaced

first line of each paragraph is indented, but there is no space between paragraphs

first page contains contact information and word count.

section headers are centered

each page (except the first) contains a header with: "authors lastname / story title / page #"

These requirements seem to be easily within pandoc’s ability though, as it can use a reference docx file.

indeed, see my other reply above, linking to an article explaining exactly how that works

News to me, but in this case, I'm happy to be wrong.

Well, adding this condition:

> Outside of the more technically inclined...

Makes it hard to definitively answer your question:

> Does anyone who is a long-form (novel) writer actually use Markdown?

I am aware of published authors who've used Ulysses, a Markdown-based multi-document editor for the Mac, for writing novels.[1] Semi-famously, mystery author David Hewson is a huge Ulysses fan, and wrote his own book about his process. I don't get the impression Hewson is super technically inclined the way, say, Matt Gemmell -- a software engineer turned novelist who's also a huge Ulysses fan -- clearly is. Some of the appeal for non-nerds is, I think, part of what grognards like George R.R. Martin and Robert Sawyer argue gives WordStar for DOS a big appeal: it's just you and your text with very little else to distract you. I've personally found that a bit overstated (most word processors have some kind of "draft mode" that, while perhaps not as minimal as just You And Your Plain Text, gets the job done), but it's clearly a thing, and I admit I enjoy writing in Ulysses more than I would expect.

Ulysses does, it's worth noting, have the capability to compile and export documents to Microsoft Word format. It's not as flexible (or overengineered) as Scrivener's compilation tools, but that's really something you should be saving until you have what you think is the final draft -- Ulysses and Scrivener, and for that matter NovelWriter, are ultimately composition tools, not editing tools. (Once you're in a "dialogue" with your editor sending Word documents with embedded revisions and comments, your manuscript is almost certainly going to stay in Word.)

I've written two novels with Scrivener, but I am slowly moving toward Ulysses for a variety of reasons -- but they are, indeed, technical reasons. I don't find the "detritus of special characters" to be particularly annoying with a well-chosen Ulysses theme; the underlines/asterisks are faded out and the italics and bold are, well, italics and bold, and for fiction that's virtually all I need.

One of my personal projects is https://betabooks.co, which is a markdown based feedback collection tool for pre-publication books. In other words, securely share a complete draft with beta readers and get their feedback nicely organized in an easy to use app.

The app works best with markdown, but very early on I had to add "paste from word" and rich text formatting because I discovered that, while _I_ write fiction in markdown, only ~5% of other authors do.

Too bad, because it fits really well for the task, and there are so many great long-form markdown writing tools. I personally prefer Ulysses for Mac.

Given how many published novelist write their first draft by hand, I'd argue rich text is not useful at all.

Manuscripts typically are just plain texts, at most some italics.

The organization, however, is very important.

I think most authors don't write in richer text format than markdown.

They don't produce richer text, they might write in a richer format, if you can all it that. Non-printing notes/comments were quite common in the DOS days, similar to the "front matter" in the screen shots, or what people would put in separate UI sections in tools like Scrivener or Ulysses (chapter notes, marginalia, cork boards etc.)

A more code-like (and probably extreme) perspective would be this screenshot from sci-fi author Vernor Vinge:

http://www.norwescon.org/archives/norwescon33/images/Vinge_s...

All kinds of annoations, references, etc – only the indented text is actual for publication.

I think you're assuming and probably wrong.

I think you are assuming. I also think there's a confusion here and that you're talking specifically about RTF while the people responding to you are talking about the capabilities provided when they use "rich". The point being that Markdown has far more formatting features than most people who write novels need, and so it is "rich enough" as a format.

I've written two novels and I'm writing my third, and as others have also pointed out, there's rarely a need for more than headlines, bold and italics, all of which are trivial in Markdown.

Whether or not the editors are capable enough depends on peoples preferences and tools. But there's nothing about writing a novel that requires a format more complex while writing (if you send it off to an editor, they'll almost certainly insist on something they can import easily into word, though some accept Google Docs or ODT these days)

But I am not assuming at all. In fact most professional writers still use Microsoft Word. It's sort of how people don't realize the world still runs on Microsoft Excel. Markdown is not "rich" in any way. It's syntactical representation for what you want the "exported" text to look like. It is not a drop in replacement for rich text editing.

Of course people who come here are going to be the outliers of this use case and say markdown is fine. Go ask Neil Gaiman or Stephen King if they know markdown and after explaining what it is ask if they need it? And I'd be willing to put money on them just stating "why not just make my italic text italic, why do I really need to put special characters around it?"

> Go ask Neil Gaiman or Stephen King if they know markdown and after explaining what it is ask if they need it? And I'd be willing to put money on them just stating "why not just make my italic text italic, why do I really need to put special characters around it?"

Gaiman has at least in the past stated he prefers to write his first drafts with a fountain pen in a physical notebook, to the point where there's various lists of the specific brands of pens he uses.

Stephen King prefers a Waterman fountain pen, though he's also been known to use typewriters, and may very well also use word processors. He's known to use Word for some work, certainly.

But because of the tools a lot of novelists use, a lot are used to using special marks to indicate the (very limited) formatting they do. Many people use multiple tools, including pens, text editors, smartphones, typewriters, or whatever is to hand. For some picking tools depending on what they work on is part of the process.

You may be right that most professional writers today use Word, but novelists makes up a very specific subset of professional writers and have very much idiosyncratic ideas about their preferred writing environment, ranging from the aforementioned fountain pens on anything from loose-leaf paper to very specific notebook choices, to old typewriters (some insisting on specific models of manual typewriters), via long outdated word processors, to modern word processors or editors written specifically for novelists (like Scrivener etc.). Or tools like the one linked here.

The point remains that in terms for formatting, Markdown is sufficient and simple. That does not mean it will be what everyone will prefer, like or even tolerate. But it has all the functionality needed to represent the formatting done in a typical novel, with minimal interference in the writing.

most authors write in Word, and use only one or two font variation bigger size for chapter titles).

i do, but i'm an unpublished writer. i didn't start using markdown until i learned to code. also, non-technical writers need to learn how to use git.

Against expectations this is not an Electron app.

It's only ~3MB small! Even with a bloated installer that contains all the dependencies (Python & Qt) it's only 35MB.

It will use only a fraction of the resources of an Electron app. It's also of course snappier that any web-app.

We need more proper desktop apps again. The Electron insanity needs to stop. Nice to see this here!

I am currently making my way through "The Fantasy Fiction Formula" by Deborah Chester. It's my first stab at this kind of thing, so it has been really eye opening. When I read any kind of fiction now, I can't help but map out all the elements of plot and scene described by Chester. (This has had the unpleasant side effect of making reading fiction less pleasurable. ah well)

So, I can see this kind of tool being very useful in structuring plots, sub-plots and scenes. I still haven't written that book though, so I am wondering if any seasoned writers here have a take on it.

I bought "Save the cat!" (I'd read some parts of Vogler's "Writer's journey" in film school) hoping to adapt the formula to writing a bad novel. Then I never did.

The weird thing about hobby projects is that they don't have an actual audience. So I write a lot about philosophy and social theory and such, but it's ultimately a lot of self-dialog. This doesn't work for fiction, even short stories. (I did write a handful of poems in the 2010s)

Michael Tucker of the YT channel Lessons From the Screenplay has a very very good list of writing books here:

https://www.lessonsfromthescreenplay.com/reading-list

The list is geared towards film media, but is a great guide on writing in general. I've read and annotated my way through all of them with gusto. I can very much recommend Into the Woods and Anatomy of Story as superb guides that really dig in deep into why we humans fall for the same stories time and time again. They are brass-tacks books and pretty philosophical at the same time, a rare combo.

Michael's list is a great place to continue studying film specifically, but writing in general.

> This has had the unpleasant side effect of making reading fiction less pleasurable. ah well

If it helps, I think this side-effect is likely to fade for good fiction. Bad-but-tolerable fiction gets ruined forever when you get better at spotting what they do and what it gets wrong...

I haven't read the book you mention, but when I've read similar type of books before it's definitively been annoying for a while, but then it goes to the background and it seems to usually just pop into my mind when I either spot particularly good or bad examples. When I notice particularly good uses of techniques now, it tends to make me appreciate the work more, if anything.

It's true that with ideas, if you wait long enough, someone will do the work for you. I was toying with an idea of "novel markup", something that could let you track characters over scenes, geographical locations and interpersonal relationships.

Things got hairy quickly so it died on pages of my notebook. Glad someone gave it a go. A header tagging is probably better than inline I wanted to have.

As someone working on an alternative editor for novelists, I appreciate what the creator(s) are going for here.

Creating ebooks is a pain in the butt for a non-technical user. But there's nothing to it if you've ever worked with HTML and CSS. Because the ebook formats are basically all variants of XML.

I'm of the opinion that there really is a place on the market for editing software that is a) hyper-focused on the needs of novelists (allowing the design and features to be focused as well); and b) handles the technical aspects of ebooks for you.

Most of the existing solutions require a certain amount of technical expertise, or are so bloated with features that managing the software becomes a project.

But this is where NovelWriter falls short, in my opinion. It solves the ebook-creation process, but from the eyes of a developer. The thing is, developers don't have these problems, because we're comfortable with the tech. 5 minutes of Googling will solve the book writing problem for any developer.

These problems persists for non-technical users. NovelWriter doesn't appear to solve them.

The interface here looks like a code editor, which isn't going to be comforting to most writers. (Ever have someone walk up to your desk and declare the code editor on your screen to be immediately indecipherable? I think they're have the same gut reaction upon seeing this editor.)

And Markdown is terrifying to non-coders. It looks like gobbledygook. We love it, but every time I've tried to show a non-developer what Markdown looked like, their eyes glazed over.

So those are my critiques. But things that I think are awesome about this project:

1. Open-source. This should always be celebrated because it's not easy to just give away your hard work. (My own app will be SaaS.)

2. Word counts per chapter and for the book as a whole, viewable at all times.

3. Editor and preview at the same time. (Common feature for markdown editors, but still well done.)

4. Solution for outlining, character profiles, tracking locations, plot points, etc. The implementation for these appears to be quite simple, too. These are features that my own app may not have at launch, so hats off.

5. They actually delivered.

I, for one, am excited about this project and will be following along.

I am currently using Obsidian for writing a book-length tutorial with multiple docs. Support for comments and footnotes are really useful to have for projects like the one I am working on.

Ulysses deciding to switch to a subscription model, locking all of my works in progress after I purchased their app for $50, pushed me back to vim for writing. It’s remarkably unremarkable and fine.

I wish this project the best of luck. Down with Ulysses.

So 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?

Have you heard of Manuskript[0]? It's an open source editor with a lot of features similar to Scrivener, runs on Linux/Windows/Mac, and has a few features that Scrivener doesn't have that have helped me plan things more fully in the past. It's not perfect, but it's a solid tool. Also, it's backed by Markdown text files.

[0]: https://www.theologeek.ch/manuskript/

I have used it, and I liked it but back when I used it:

1. It was only for linux (and I hope OS a lot)

2. I either didn't know, or didn't appreciate, that it uses Markdown.

Thanks for the tip.

(I also think there was only an option to install it from a site I did not know if I could trust, and I hate building from source.)

I looked at the project, and the editor doesn't look to bad, but why, oh why, yet another markdown-ish format? Did you REALLY need to do that? There are multiple markdown flavors, and, if you want something a bit more 'bookish' there's a nice ecosystem around asciidoc(-tor). Did you REALLY need to introduce another markdown?

On 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.

Fiction.live looks really interesting. Thanks for sharing it. Might want to check out https://twinery.org/ if you haven't already

Somebody feels we need to found a middle way between full WYSIYWG and two pane source/preview for Markdown writing?

Maybe ghostwriter[0] is what you are looking for?

[0] http://wereturtle.github.io/ghostwriter/

I just found typora[0] and Emacs "M-x markdown-toggle-markup-hiding" :)

[0] https://typora.io/

> https://support.typora.io/License-Agreement/

EULA?! Thanks, but NO.

P.S. ghtostwriter is fully free & open-source, instead of proprietary Typora.

Also found MarkText, MIT Licensed: https://marktext.app/

Also Vim's markdown conceal as seen here: https://github.com/plasticboy/vim-markdown#syntax-concealing

The vim-pandoc-syntax plugin also has syntax concealing enabled by default, IIRC.

You may have a look at Zettlr: https://zettlr.com/ (open-source)

I am writing a novel in Markdown using Emacs. For most of the novel writing process Markdown is enough. I have been toying with the idea of tweaking the markdown like this novelWriter does, mostly because I constantly find myself wanting to annotate my text, or temporarily mark out, but not delete, blocks of text.

Lots of comments here to the effect of "novelists don't need full-featured rich styling*, it's all just plain text!" It's true for _many_ novels.

But it's not true for _all_ novels! House of Leaves (Danielewski) and S. (Abrams/Dorst) are full-fledged multimedia novels. Many fantasy novels use maps; Crying of Lot 49 uses at least 1 image, in situ. And I would love to see an edition of Pale Fire (Nabokov) that interposes annotations between the "original formatting" of the poem!

"The novel" isn't really a well-defined concept...there are many interpretations of the basic concept! The high % of novels that are "just text" is descriptive, not prescriptive.

* Use whatever definition of "rich text" you like, I don't care

Two of my favourite authors draft by hand, which I still do (we're all in our fifties). What I want is not yet another (sigh) editor for writers but OCR tools that can be trained for cursive and don't soil the bed on encountering a crossed out word or insertion.

Possibly relevant alternative product: Dabble, which includes plotting tools, etc, using Svelte as UI if I understood it correctly. https://www.dabblewriter.com/

Great 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

I have the complete opposite view as you. Markdown is for advanced blogging and since novel writers don't need advanced html formatting they don't need markdown.

Ebook formats are mostly HTML and (a strictly limited subset of) CSS. So, given that a book will eventually be rendered down to HTML, markdown isn't really that bad of a choice.

Especially since things like tables can actually be useful, depending on what you're writing.

Okay, so this looks incredible, congrats on the 1.0!

Something a bit interesting but entirely unrelated: around 2018-06, I started a shell repo for a project named 'NovelWrite,' [1] (unrelated to this project, but a markdown novel serializer) then promptly forgot about it.

Seeing novelWriter (this post) surface to the top spot was pretty interesting because, despite similar names, I was unaware of this project until now.

1: I'm not going to post the link to the repo as I'm not trying to advertise it; it's really quite a horrible project. I just found the coincidence mildly amusing.

I don't get it. Why "markdown-like". Do people writing novels have some need that is unmet by an existing flavour of markdown? Because I have to say that the last thing that ecosystem needs is yet another flavour. I thought the entire point to markdown was that you didn't need a special editor. Which of course has done nothing to reduce their mushrooms-in-a-damp-cellar proliferation.

Apparently they _removed_ some features of markdown, while adding some special comment forms to designate inline meta-data like a synopsis.

https://novelwriter.readthedocs.io/en/stable/int_interface.h...

NB: I'm an emacs/org-mode/pandoc toolchain devotee (aficionado? cultmember?), so I should disclose that I don't get the point of most editing tools.

This looks awesome! I'm super excited to take it for a spin I confused about how to actually run this on a Mac. I downloaded source and stepped through the 3 steps on the website: brew install enchant, pip3 install --user -r requirements.txt, pip3 install --user pyobjc

What do I do now? There is no dmg created or further instructions. Adding a dmg to the site would really open up your potential users.

Interesting. Does that make it kinda midway between "pure" MarkDown and reStructuredText? As in, it's a bit more powerful than pure MarkDown, but still lighter to use than reStructuredText?

I mean, if you don't mind summoning the awesome power of something like Visual Studio Code, you could also write reStructureText with live preview (there's a VSCode extension for that, IIRC).

Very nice from the screenshot provided and I would like to try running later this month.

With new GNU license is it fine to release something new in same why there are different linux flavors? As I understand I must than return also provide the product source code as well and must also release under GNU, or is it something else?

Or am I thinking here of GPL? If anyone has info please share!

Looks pretty cool!

I have ended up settling on a similar setup for my writing in VS Code. I am a heavy outliner so instead of [FileTree][Markdown][Preview] I use [FileTree][Outline][Markdown].

I'm not sure I would find the various bits of stats useful, although I am sure there are some who do. I think it would probably just cause me anxiety or cause me to put too much focus on numbers.

I went to the documentation to SEE the software's User Interface. (i.e. what does it look like to use this software?) But sadly, like many open source projects they don't make the UI easy to see in the documentation or github pages. It's like they require to you install it before showing you how it works???

Looks 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.

> it's ideas and sitting down in front of the keyboard and actually typing

This is the crux of the challenge for every writer. At least for me, I use "finding the right tool" as a way to procrastinate from actually writing...

i wrote my story in plain text in vim. when i was forced to convert to libre office in order to produce the format required for submission, editing became a pain, and i felt blocked from working on the story any further, since i no longer was able to just take any break i had to work on it.

not being able to use my preferred editor, i too ended up searching for a better solution...

What a pain! And there don't seem to be any good + easy answers...

I'm addicted to my emacs bindings, and not using them trips me up—I might as well draft in plaintext, like you said preferred editor minimizes friction.

But then there's the cost of switching tools at different stages of the writing process. Arguably, that's even more difficult!

the editing itself wasn't even the problem, but i realized that i want to track changes as the story evolves, and while i know that libreoffice can do that, there is just no comparison to text based version control systems.

if i had accepted that i would be comfortable enough with libreoffice, that would have been fine, but having to face switching back and forth, and continuously reformatting, made me dread the whole process.

so yes, switching is really the most difficult aspect.

fortunately, as discussed elsewhere here, there is a way to automatically convert from plain text to the format required for submission, so i should be able to continue writing without this roadblock now

Yeah and "building my own editor that's just right for me" is a tempting next level procrastination.

Here that OP, Foldable Regions ^.

I used Scrivener (MacOS) for my first novel, but I did not use most of the features of the software. Now it's stuck as the last remaining 32-bit app on MacOS, and I've debating whether to pay for an upgrade or use something else for novel #2.

I've learned about this at a very good time!

Missing any reference to the one and only editor, every commentator was actually having in mind: Emacs.

Oh man, I'm definitely gonna try this. I recently did a good bit of research into how I could write a novel (or anything with footnotes) in plain text, and it was surprisingly difficult - so much so that I just decided to use Scrivener instead. But this looks promising!

It is certainly interesting. If you want to check out some free alternative, that are pretty neat for longer writing, I really like Quoll Writer.

It does have few more useful features like password protected writing, pretty ergonomic, but less standard interface and few UI translations.

Looks great. I would be delighted to have the small task of converting to docx when the big task of actually writing a novel is made easier by this and finished! (Also python has docx libraries so docx is unlikely to be too much trouble in due course). Well done!

Tried installing via pip3 on Debian Buster, and it segfaults immediately. I'm sure it's an issue with my system, but I can't figure out what; there's no useful debug information, even though it tries to open KDE's bug report dialog.

On a tangent, if someone is looking for Markdown-like syntax for script writing, Fountain is great. I've found it a joy to use in my classes. https://fountain.io/

Are there any minimal editors like this that support vim-like keybindings?

I've been using Sublime-Text with a markdown plugin, but interested in something more focused on prose writing.

(I also use 1Writer on iOS which is a solid plaintext/markdown editor.)

Probably a dumb question - what makes it not suitable for writing technical books?

is author here?

- Is it suitable for non-technical writers? is there any feedback on them baing able to use markdown, @pov tags etc?

- did you try some commercial competitors? How would you compare? I understand scrivener is one popular option

UPD: Dev just answered[0] to your qestions:

Q: Is it suitable for non-technical writers? is there any feedback on them baing able to use markdown, @pov tags etc?

A: "non-technical" as in the person or the writing itself? I deliberately chose not to write a WYSIWYG editor in order to keep the files plain text and as simple as possible. I've written a WYSIWYG editor before, and didn't like the result. I guess having to use some markup makes it slightly technical in use, but I've also added menu entries and keyboard shortcuts for all the features, so it shouldn't be too difficult to get started.

Q: Did you try some commercial competitors? How would you compare? I understand scrivener is one popular option

A: I've used it, yes. It's excellent, and perfect if you want a full WYSIWYG editor with a lot of features. I went in a different direction exactly because I wanted something simpler. Also, as a Linux user, the lack of decent options was a factor.

[0] https://github.com/vkbo/novelWriter/discussions/567#discussi...

I'm actually support for similar tagging to my own personal editor (for my first two novels I used a mix of Google Docs (yes, really) and Libre Office; using my own editor for my third). I'm definitively going to steal ideas from this one...

I don't think using those kind of features requires any technical understanding at all. If anything, people are used to doing "ad hoc" tagging with easily searchable strings.

So this is really good for what it is - an open source Scrivener. If I didn't have the cash for Scrivener I'd use this until I could afford it.

Very cool, I've always wanted a tool like this that uses Vim macros. This doesn't quite meet that need but looks very useful nonetheless.

Why is there still no text editors as smart about the text as JetBrains IDE as smart about the code, or there is?

awesome, gonna give this a try. i've tried making something like this but got to a point where it was becoming more sophisticated and difficult, so i shelved the project. i've decided that my time is better spent working on writing projects, so thanks for sharing.

Very very interesting reads, thanks for sharing!

don't suppose you can make this, but aimed at thesis writing?

The proliferation of markdown forks is a mess. Can't you just use something better to begin with, like asciidoc? I think you can likely just use existing asciidoc mechanisms to support the same thing and then existing editors will still be usable.

The proliferation of markdown itself is also a mess IMO. Outside of web writing it seems really more effort than it's worth. Seems like everyone making a writing tool of any kind is ditching rich text in favor of it for no good reason.

For me, plaintext (like Markdown) is a strength over proprietary or binary formats and I've accepted the tradeoffs. It's the primary "good reason" I use Markdown. I have confidence that text will always be readable in the future even if I don't have the app that made it. Secondarily I find most word processors overkill with toolbars everywhere and I do not like using them.

Has anyone used bookdown on R? https://bookdown.org/yihui/bookdown/

It would be amazing if it fixed your grammar, removed cliches, fixed wordiness, activated passive language, swapped repeated words, fixed my run on sentences, overall just fixed my englitch.

#featurerequest

You're looking for proselint. https://github.com/amperser/proselint

Looks very interesting, but the example given ("John is very unique") and the warning given by proselint for it illustrates why this is a veritable mine-field, and why what sleepysysadmin asks for isn't really possible (but that's ok - having a tool flag possible issues is still great)

The example warning is certainly worth giving, but conversely Merriam-Webster points out that "very unique" is a common construction when "unique" is used in the sense "unusual", though most frequently used in less formal contexts. And so it may or may not be justified depending on what you're writing...

Having gone back and forth with a real editor for a novel, half the effort was a conversation with the editor based on questions about intent and preferred tone and style, in order to come to agreement on things she had flagged as possible issues where it was not clear whether or not a change ought to be made or not.

I'm absolutely going to take a closer look at proselint, though.

Certainly. I think the idea is you pick and choose the plugins that suit you (so it's probably not a perfect fit for OP) based on what you think your strengths and weaknesses are. And taste: I want to slap everyone who sticks an adjective in front of "unique", so that rule works for me. No matter what Black says, all linters are an aggregation of someone's tastes and you are free to tweak as you see fit. Descriptivism beats prescriptivism where language is concerned IMHO.

Scrivener should integrate this.

ProWritingAid integrates with Scrivener and provides grammar checking, repeated words, and much more to help you improve whatever you're writing. http://prowritingaid.com/

Friendly advice: This is helpful to know about, contextually relevant, etc and I'm glad you posted it, but you should probably disclose that you're the CEO.

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.

>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 much to write a novel but rather improve upon my englitch. Now I have chosen writing a novel in order to improve but I dont know where I went wrong.

I would love a human editor but that costs $. I doubt anyone is giving me a dime for my book. I don't have >$1000 to get my book edited.

Of which any hired editor will just shoot themselves.

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)

>For that use, I think "proselint", as zx321 recommended, is probably a perfect start, as it references the source of the recommendation.

I see that, I will give it a try. Cant hurt.

>(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)

Lets say there was a magical machine learning perfect editor for free. I input my trash and I get an amazing copy out.

I might try marketing and selling it. I have put lots of effort into the book. Afterall just getting 75,000 words down is good effort by itself.

The problem is that I put this in grammarly or prowriting aid it finds thousands of problems. You fix them. Then put it in another grammar thing and it finds thousands more.

Yeah, Grammarly etc. is great for short things like e-mails and the like, but it's a massive pain for anything of any complexity...

Thanks for mentioning proselint. I just took a quick look and it looks really interesting. Going to give it a try.

I tried using Grammarly when writing a novel, and just had to turn it off. It gets things wrong so often that it just turned out to be a distraction. I still like using it for e-mails etc. but for anything that will pass through a professional editor anyway it's just not worth the hassle to me.

I'll learn you why formats doesn't matter. If your book is good we'll pirate it. And if your book is good it doesn't matter how you write it. The publishers will be willing to dig through your shit to get to the grains of it. Trust me. If you worry about formats you need to write better. Let that shit sink in. It really doesn't at all matter. And if you're popular you'll both earn a million and have a million pirates dude. Just write a good book. Bad books is nothing anyone cares about.

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