Hacker News Reader

Comment by cocacola1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com