Setting up for longform non-fiction technical writing

divsmart

Hi, after a long hiatus, I finally decided that the glitches in other apps (no names) started to bite too deeply into my workflow. So I Added Zettlr to my Debian sources, connected with WebDAV to my cloud, and dragged my md files into a workspace. Now I have my unfinished 500+ page book in Zettlr.

I customized the CSS mostly for screen aethsetics and poor eyesight, and once it's ready, export it to clean text, and import it into Scribus for final layout and styling.

Zettlr always struck me as suited more for a doctoral thesis with full citations, biblios, following rigorous academic standards, but I wonder if it can be configured for my long form writing approach. Here is TOC
ed Snippet of Chapter 1
I'd appreciate some tweaks and guidance on how to use Zettlr efficiently for this type of longform.

My thanks also to the MOD @nathanlesage for taking me off a mistaken 20 year suspension. I would have been released 3 weeks after my 88th birthday 🙂

professed

Hello! One nice thing to know about is the "Projects" feature, which allows you to line up (and re-arrange, where necessary) a collection of individual notes, such that they export as a single document.

Anything in particular you'd like to be able to do with the app that you're not seeing right away?

divsmart

professed Thanks for your reply. I saw that feature in the manual, but could not see how Projects would fit into this workflow: exporting from Zettlr to UTF-8. Then import chapters one at time into their appropriate text frames in Scribus to lay out and style.

So far I have found Zettlr easy to work with and love that is adheres closely to CommonMark.

To anwser your question. Coming from Obsidian they have a third-party community plugin for novelists that does word count and reading time. It would be great if Zettlr could show that for each file as per the embedded image. Now I have to calculate 250 words per minute, so my chapters don't get too long, but its a distraction from my writing.

Novel Word Count

Can Zettlr do this?

Other than that, I am quite enjoying the experience.

professed

Not to my knowledge! You could file a feature request on GitHub, though.

divsmart

professed part of it is in the status bar. It would be nice to have reading time and pages.