Scrivener Tutorial 3: XSLT Makes Things Easier

Our third Scrivener Tutorial is all about optimizing – optimizing our workflow. Making something easier does, in this case, necessarily mean it has to be done in Scrivener. Like I promised in the first screencast of this series. I’d like to show how to write documents for your university or a book. As a result, in the third part of the Scrivener Tutorials we will have a look at MultiMarkdown and XSLT and how both can make our lives easier.
MultiMarkdown uses XSLT to generate LaTeX, RTF, or whatever output is required. Scriveners MultiMarkdown Settings can be configured to use one specific XSLT file on export. This screencast shows my favored workflow. (After many tries struggling with MultiMarkdown, Scrivener, XSLT and LaTeX…)

Scrivener Tutorial number 2 is, by the way, this way.

MultiMarkdown XSLT

The XSLT Files are kept in:

~/Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown/XSLT

The one we will be using is called latex-snippet.xslt. This file generates a plain LaTeX file from Markdown without preamble.

XSLT Snippet Advantage

The trick is, we will now use two files, one is the master document and the other one is the file just created. With the LaTeX command:

\include{}

can that file be referenced from the master document. That way a preamble can be set up, which justifies our needs and from there on it’s very simple to generate a PDF.

Download

Here’s is my template for you to download.

Our third Scrivener Tutorial is all about optimizing – optimizing our workflow. Making something easier does, in this case, necessarily mean it has to be done in Scrivener. Like I...