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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

I used Scrivener for a while. I switched to Vellum, which I like much better.

What was the decider? I wanted to have "drop caps", that cool feature where the first letter of a chapter is 3 or 4 lines big. The forums for Scrivener suggested some very complicated ways to do it involving CSS. In Vellum it's just one of the styles. Silly, but it's my book and I wanted it.

Vellum also seems to know publishing conventions better (the half-title page, the copyright page, About the Author, etc.) They make your book not look so self-published.

I'm not trashing Scrivener, though. It's a good product.

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I think Vellum's whole value proposition is typesetting ebooks and other "rich" formats. I've never tried to sell my writing, so Pandoc with a bit of custom CSS has worked great for me, but if I ever feel the need to build a fancy ebook I'll be looking at Vellum first.

When I first got serious about writing fiction I used Vim (with Markdown), then switched to Scrivener, but I can not deal with the rich text crap anymore so I went to Obsidian for the best of both worlds, sort of. If Scrivener had a plaintext mode I'd probably still be using it.

WYSIWYG editing is a curse on mankind. Write first, then typeset.

I think Scrivener also has different goals: Vellum looks like it's intended for publishing, but Scrivener I think of more as an organizational tool. That said, I've been using Dabble if only because it's all cloud-based and I don't have to worry about syncing files around myself.

Strange comparison. Scrivener is for writing books, Vellum for publishing, even if scrivener has a publish option. But they rather complement each other. Scrivener is incredible value for money.

"writing books" vs. "publishing" ? Is that a sharp distinction?

Scriveners tools are designed to help a person write like keeping track of timelines, character sheets, and the like.

It sounds like the other product has tools for typesetting and layout, which are tools for publishing your finished work.

It's usually done by different people with different job descriptions.

A writer's output are manuscripts, works of art.

A publisher's output is a commercial offering of books, a business.

[1] https://askanydifference.com/difference-between-author-and-p...

I agree, but the latter can also be a work of art. Typesetting is definitely something that can be done right or wrong, and sometimes to a breathtakingly high standard.

The publisher engages or hires typesetters, as part of the publishing process.

I recently wasted three days trying to get Scrivener to do something very basic - autonumber sections in a book without including part numbers.

It should have been easy, but the autonumbering features didn't work as advertised and I ended up with something that is probably a hack that relies on some bugs.

It's good VFM, but considering its audience it's also one of the most user-hostile pieces of software I've ever used. [1]

There's far too much "Yes it does that but it's not designed for it so keep your expectations low" for comfort.

Either include features and make them professional, or don't include them at all. I'd happily pay two or three times as much for something that does all the things it sorta kinda implies it does but you know actually not really.

Vellum does almost nothing in comparison except produce a limited range of beautiful books. But perhaps that may be of some interest to writers?

[1] TBF it's far better than Calibre. But that has the excuse of being free.

Kinda my feeling. But I won't trash Scrivener.

> Vellum does almost nothing in comparison except produce a limited range of beautiful books.

Exactly. That's all I want. Hopefully a higher price means they can live on that alone.

And they have fonts which not everyone in the world is using. Maybe Scrivener does too; haven't checked.

But maybe this will start a flame war: Guy Kawasaki recommends Adobe InDesign. To hell with monthly fees, so no.

InDesign is great, if you want to precisely layout print books. It does not support ebooks at all.

Doing both at once is Vellum's sweet spot.

If you don't want to pay subscriptions, I've heard Affinity Publisher is a good option.

Yeah, I gave up on Scrivener for anything to do with formatting. If you are going to use Scrivener, use it for an editor/organizer, and export the result as a word doc, and then process that in Vellum. Then you get good tools doing what they are good at.

I only tried the trial of Vellum but, from what I remember, it was easy to use and beautiful to boot. Definitely a lot less complicated than Scrivener (which, if your goal is to write a book, is probably the way to go). It seems like a joy to work in for the long haul.

The thing for me is price. Vellum is $200-250, Scrivener is $60 (I got it for ~$40 with NaNoWriMo discounts a few years ago, if I recall correctly). Plus you can write screenplays in it, which was another bonus. I have spent more time than I should customizing it, but that ended up being part of the joy. I've more than a million words in it so it's unlikely I'll switch, but it's a joy to use.

I actually think the higher price is an asset, not a liability (unless you can't afford it, of course). It means they have a business model that doesn't require a huge mass market to survive, so they won't go broke or get acquired and watered down by some big company.

I'd agree with that. I certainly hope they're able to stay in business – it seems as though Vellum takes care of everything. About the only thing it can't do (I might be wrong) is that it can't output to Word format? I'm the process of publishing a book right now and they've requested everything in Word.

Edit: Turns out that as of ~10 days ago, you can, in fact, export to Word (https://blog.vellum.pub/) in Vellum.

I just looked: you can export to RTF. So couldn't Word import that?

I was wrong. Just took a look at their blog and apparently as of 3.4 (Nov. 16, 2022) you can export to Word (https://blog.vellum.pub/). That's excellent.

Strong recommendation (echoed by many I've talked to). Write in word, format in Vellum. Don't use Vellum as an editor, that's not its strength.

If you make any changes to the word doc, you just use "reimport word document" in Vellum, and you are ready to print/upload again.

If you’re interested in screenplays you might be interested in the fountain file format. It’s like markdown but for screenplays. It allows you to write screenplays in any text editor and I really like the simplicity of it; keeps me focussed on the task at hand. There’s a very cool app created by screenwriter John August (Big Fish, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory) called Highlander2 on the Mac App Store that is purpose built for it (technically it uses a custom file format called highland but it’s basically just a folder with a fountain file inside it and a few other files for editor settings, metadata and handling images if you have any). There’s also fountain extensions for VS Code, Sublime Text, Obsidian and probably other editors out there I don’t know of.

Links:

https://fountain.io/

https://highland2.app/index.php

I've listened to John August's Scriptnotes podcast (fantastic and ad-free) but I haven't tried out Highland 2 yet. Will check it out – thanks!

Give Beat a look, too.

https://kapitan.fi/beat/

This is awesome, never heard of it until now. Seriously cool bit of software. Love that it uses Courier Prime as well, it's my default font everywhere!

Podcast interviews with screenwriters of major productions -- Die Hard, Terminator 2, Back To The Future -- Script Apart by Al Hoerner.

Highland 2 is fantastic. For sheer speed and beauty when writing it's great. The UI is like a much simplified but also much nicer (because of that) version of Scrivener (I own both). And the file format is easy to parse if you need to.

Vellum is expensive in comparison to Scrivener, but the output is very nice and you soon see the increased value of using it.

Scrivener and Vellum do different jobs. At a simplistic level the former is for creating the content and the latter for producing the final outputs (Scrivener can do both but really only excels at the first).

Vellum looks excellent, thanks for mentioning it.

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