@chaas if there is another writing tool out there which directly imports and exports MS Word, Markdown, LaTeX in an integrated way, has embedded figure panels, table editing and equation markup, cross-referencing, an internal citation tool… I've missed it? In other words, in terms of feature set I simply refer you to the above points on the combination of tools that Manuscripts brings together for the first time, it is really only rather vaguely overlapping with either the MS Word sort of word processor or a Scrivener sort of creative /complex document aimed writing tool, I genuinely believe we are the first to really integrate these tools together in a compelling, serious way and whilst I respect Scrivener and creative writing aimed writing tools like it hugely and it's fair to say they have been an inspiration also for Manuscripts in part, but so has been also…
- HTML and CSS (the separation of content and presentation).
- LaTeX (mathematical markup and a writing workflow largely focused on the content vs the presentation).
- LyX (discussed in some other forum threads).
- Markdown: clean, simple, human readable markup (Manuscripts natively supports pasting it in, and copying it out to the clipboard, as it does LaTeX).
- Re-thinking word processing with a very semantically clean and rich document structure: for instance you don't need to really choose paragraph styles, you just write and the styling is applied and in a lot of ways you have much less ways of violating the styling (as it is are largely implicit based on the element).
Aside from a strong feature set towards technical and scientific writing, we've focused a lot on a really clean, simple user interface, hiding a lot of the underlying complexity away. We have also made technology choices right from the beginning aimed at collaborative writing on other platforms and indeed potentially an iOS version in mind.
