Anyone been using Scrivener for awhile?

[dolphin842]

I'm about to plunge into my 30-day trial of Scrivener (I'm mostly looking to use it for academic writing). As I dive in, I thought I'd ask the forum to see if anyone here has been using it for a while and, if so, whether or not you think it continues to live up to the positive feedback it has received. Also, any off-the-beaten-path tips or tricks to help me get the best out of it would be much appreciated!

 

[Vinnie_vw]

I've used it and bought it. I'm also writing my thesis, though I was at the 70% finished state when I got Scrivener.

My take is that it's a great app for brainstorming and working on several parts of a document at once. It's excellent for fiction-writing. What it's completely unsuitable for is for producing the final product, and granted that was never it's intention. It doesn't support footnote-referencing and indexing pages, which also makes it less suitable for research papers.

So bottom-line: Scrivener kicks ass for early-stage writing-projects. It's great for large projects that require parallel thinking. It's not great for complex document-manipulation.

A great app for academic writing is Mellel. It's also got a 30 day free trial and costs the same as Scrivener, so check it out! Another, I hear good stuff about (but haven't tried) is Nisus Writer. And, last but not least, Microsoft Word.

 

[mokeyjoe]

Scrivener is fantastic for writing fiction - I'm not sure how good it would be for iother stuff. Certainly to produce a finished document you'd want to export it to another program. But then it isn't intended to be a layout or word processing app.

Check out the Scrivener forums they're really good.