Manuscripts 1.0

Posted by Paul Korm
Nov 15, 2015 at 12:40 PM

Thank you for pointing this out. It’s a purpose-built editor that might be useful for writing papers with illustrations, formulae and citations. Some features seem unncessarily complicated—e.g., as far as I can tell, there’s no way to move more than one paragarph at a time between sections. I found it rather slow when making outlines—the “usual” method of tabbing to indent or shift-tabbing to outdent doesn’t work here. In fact, an odd design choice, the tab key moves the pointer to the end of a line. Manuscripts seems to want to struggle against the user instead of help. There’s no focused-writing mode—maybe someday that will be included. Another missing piece is a quick look preview, which is essential for OS X documents in my opinion. The lack of quick look support reduces the usefulness of DEVONthink or its cousins as repositories for .manuscript documents—cannot view more than a slim portion of the manuscript contents when browsing files in DEVONthink, etc. That’s a possible downside for academic users. Finally, there’s quite a few bugs and hangs; the inspector stops working sometimes; the app crashes when saving a second copy of documents.

Bernhard wrote:
It seems to be an interesting app for outlining and writing
>(http://www.manuscriptsapp.com/). It is free for texts with up to 1.500
>words. Until 1st December there is a special price.