Thoughts on migrating from Ulysses

I started using Ulysses a long time ago, and it’s still a good thing to use, but there’s not a lot of value add for me personally, over (for example) having a Writing database in DT3.

Any chance anyone else has experience with this?

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I am still considering if/how to migrate my writing from Ulysses to DT3, but I have not done so yet. I get fairly good results when I set Typora as my default Markdown editor and then store the .md files in DT3. Compiling a set of .md files to a PDF is more complicated this way, but it works well for standalone files.

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Basically that’s also possible inside DEVONthink by converting the Markdown documents to PDF and merging the PDF documents.

Yes, Typora/iAWriter + DT3 is my current workflow too – they just go so well together!

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Yes a big Typora user myself, have not found a better Markdown editor yet. Like the WYSIWYG environment.

How do you compile/combine separate documents into a complete work?

I can see several methods. What works for you?

Depends on how familiar you are with command line tools, makefiles, scripts and plain cat commands into a final document. Some markdown document generators also have their own systems for defining the order of documents into a final pdf or epub rendering.

I have thought about this but saw no real point in doing it or advantage. I put a lot of notes in DEVONthink 3 using the notetaker in sorter though. I don’t write in the app as a general principle.

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I’m experimenting with that just this morning. I am writing an article with a group as the document, and then individual groups within the big group as sections of the article, and then individual documents within each group for multi paragraph subsections.

I haven’t gotten to the combining part yet though. Still writing.

@Mitch_Wagner and @Amontillado

It’s possible the simple Tools > Merge command will suffice. Do note when merging files, the order is from top to bottom, so the top item in the selection will be first, then the one below it is the second, etc.

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That is exactly what I would expect. Good interface design there!

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I had forgotten tools-merge, and there’s something really cool. If you set the sort option to unsorted, you can drag and rearrange the files however you want. Then, tools-merge merges them in that order.

Go back to sort by name if you want, and the unsorted order you set will come back when you go back to unsorted mode.

Nice.

Yep. From Help > Documentation > Menus > The Tools Menu

It would be nice to have transclusion working in DT3 (part of the MMD 6), but this can be overcome by letting the files in an indexed folder and then using Multimarkdown Composer ou nvUltra to view them.

This seems to make writing longer essays in DT a task more feasible. As it is right now, you can’t properly view all the parts together if you can’t keep them in different files.

In Scrivener, Ulysses, Tinderbox or Connected Text this would be easy.

Intersting idea - can you expand on how you would do this?

@cgrunenberg would have to assess the feasibility of implementing this.

Just to follow up: I played around with export (or Quick Export as it shows up in Ulysses’ menu), and it works, except that the hierarchical structure is lost if you export from “the top-level”.

So if you care about preserving the hierarchical structure, as far as I can tell, you’d have to export individual sheets.

(For most of the stuff I care about though, the top-level export is good enough)

This will be very cool.

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Forgive me, complete n00b here. I see how I can save files in the “inbox”, but I’m unclear on how I can save in any sort of folder structure outside that. Is it possible?

Welcome @randallb

The Global Inbox is the only inbox that can be directly saved to.