Manuscripts 1.0

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Posted by Bernhard
Nov 14, 2015 at 05:23 PM

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.

Posted by andante
Nov 15, 2015 at 10:30 AM

I tried it but it seemed a bit clunky and relatively unintuitive (at least for me). I like the fact that it all revolves around the concept of paragraph/ section, but instead of removing clutter to concentrate on your writing, it adds complexity.
Perhaps, I think, it could be useful for those in the field as it has a ton of “templates” for academic journals.

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.

Posted by MadaboutDana
Nov 16, 2015 at 09:27 AM

Thanks for that - looks fascinating. I shall have a play!

Posted by MadaboutDana
Nov 16, 2015 at 02:18 PM

Really rather powerful. I’ve only had a very brief chance to play (busy at the moment), but it’s a fully equipped authoring program, from what I’ve seen, with some really nice features (and it does now have a focus mode, Paul). Seems fairly quick and responsive, too.

Looks like a very interesting alternative to e.g. Ulysses or Scrivener, but with more emphasis on academic output.

I shall play some more when I’ve got a bit more time.

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