Authors, Writers and Editors on the Mac

I do most of my writing in Ulysses, which is a markdown editor that applies styling on export rather than during the writing and editing process. I don’t know how well it does tables as they aren’t something I usually use, though I do know it supports tables. Its main disadvantage over Pages is that it’s subscription based.

I’ve worked in Pages before, I ran into similar issues. Also, I find it easier in long form writing if I can jump around in the document, which is harder with something like Pages. Ulysses allows me to break larger projects into smaller pieces that are reassembled during export. It’s also possible to work in a style similar to what you mentioned by “gluing” sheets together. It isn’t exactly the same as a single, continuous document, but the transition between glued sheets is pretty smooth from what I remember (I haven’t used glued sheets for a while).

yes, you can change the style, font, paragraph spacing, all that, but not while editing or using markdown syntax. when exporting to word, pdf or whatever, in that export screen, there's a button that says "swiss knife""" you click on that. You have ooptions in there such as academica, manuscript, papers, etc. in addition, you can create your own styles or download many community-made styles from the style exchange.

Forgot to mention, I use ulysses all the time. while it is subscription based, I'd personally say for the features and the accessibility of the app, it's definitely worth it. Their customer service is excellent.

But you don't want to subscribe to Ulysses yet, there's Macdown 3000.

https://macdown.app/

Ulysses, as I understand it, has a lot more writing help stuff, e.g. you can write in sections and then easily rearrange sections. Also Macdown 3000 might not support all of the Markdown capabilities. But if you've never messed around with Markdown, it's free. So you could do some testing to see if it makes any sense for you to use at all, and if it does, well you know Ulysses will do more stuff.

Coming from a full windows background where editing text doesn't require for me to think twice whether VO can follow me and whatever app I'm using, I find it a hard sell for long form writing to rely on a 3rd party thing just to edit / arrange text in an accessible way. Like text editing is literally the basic task of anycomputer, and apple is seriously failing on this. Like the kind of editing mentioned in this thread. I still find it incredibly hard to just write code on macos and smile, but I don't want to pollute and go off topic.
The problem with pages is exactly that, beyond very basic thing it's hard to trust what VO says to me. In theory their interface is very very good and I find it conceptually beautiful, and VO still shines there.
But in one of my latest message here, I reported that when we select text in pages, and if there is any text style applied, like body (copying from word) or any other, VO will announce this text style, then a pause that can be quite long depending on your tts, and then the word / sentance / paragraph. This is just one random bug that has resurfaced recently among the long list of problems with iwork and nstextview in general (any text field from dumb to smart in macos and other platforms).

If you want a professional-quality typesetting program with hundreds of packages that can satisfy any formatting requirement you might reasonably have, then LaTeX is available and reliable. On the Mac, you can install MacTeX, either directly or via HomeBrew. MacTeX includes a text editor that supports LaTeX, but you can use any editor that you wish, as long as it can write plain text files.

LaTeX is used in publishing, especially for scholarly books and journals. It produces typeset PDF output, and there are multiple tools avaialble to convert LaTeX documents to HTML. Support for tagged PDF is a relatively recent addition that continues to be improved. The visual quality of the typesetting is famously better than what word processors offer, including full justification, automatic hyphenation, kerning, ligatures, and so on.

If you don't like LaTeX, then Typst is the emerging alternative, although unfortunately it isn't accepted by publishers yet. It has the potential to become the better option for new documents, but for now, there aren't as many packages available and the depth of software support you'll find for LaTeX doesn't exist.

I only use a word processor for writing projects if I'm collaborating with co-authors who are word processor users. Otherwise, it's Markdown, LaTeX, or direct HTML for Web-centric projects.

You have some control over style and formatting, through the style system mentioned above, which will be suitable for most prose writers. But, if you wanted to say create a rainbow in your text where every letter is a different color, or arrange the text in a particular shape like some poets might do, Ulysses wouldn’t be the right tool. The styling offered by Ulysses is similar to, if not the same as, that offered by CSS for HTML pages.

While I sort of get the complaint, lots of apps are third party, e.g. Word does not come with Windows. Can you even do RTF in Windows anymore? You can in TextEdit and RTF has at least some formatting. I thought RTF was in Wordpad and that's gone. Maybe Notepad can do it now? Anyway, I'm fairly sure any writing beyond plain text or possibly RTF is third party something on just about every OS I know of, certainly Windows.

But more importantly I think, Ulysses is doing its own things. The two I know about are Markdown, which is nice if it works for you. For instance, *this is italicized text* means you know exactly what's italicized without having to examine fonts and the like.

The other one is arranging things, say you're writing a novel and you want what's now Ch. 27 after Ch. 42. You don't need to go find the text of 27, select it, cut it, find the text of 42, get to the end, and paste. Just move Ch. 27 after Ch. 42 in the list of sections.

I'm sure it does a lot more stuff I don't know about, I haven't needed to personally use it yet, but these both seem pretty useful, if they're the kinds of problems you need to solve. These are the two big things I remember back when I was looking into it as a potential blog composing tool, among other things.

The other big writing app that gets mentioned a lot is Scrivener, which just makes me want to yell "Bartleby!" and then hide under my desk from the English lit class flashbacks. I don't remember much about this, I checked it out on Windows but it was inaccessible. I'm fairly sure it's accessible on Mac and iOS though, unless that's changed recently. I think it's been a couple of years since I really looked into writing apps, at the time i was seeing if one of them would work on both iOS and Windows.

I use Scrivener, and its default manuscript export format does 99% of what I want.

If I want heading styles and control over heading levels, I upload the docx file to Google Docs and do it there. Much easier than using Pages or arm-twisting Scrivener to export it that way.

I avoid tables like the plague. Most of what I write is fiction, so it's generally not a problem.

The real issue is that us writers are often part of a larger community of mostly sighted writers who love to color-code their text and use tables with abandon.

Despite the barriers and hurdles, I'm a writer. Twenty published short stories. So, if there's a will, there's a way.

I do most of my writing iin Markdown using the Macdown app, which can export to HTML or formatted PDF. You can also paste markdown straight into wordpress and it will automatically create the correct blocks. However Macdown is currently an intel app that no-longer seems to be in active development, so it will stop working soon. I am working on a replacement called Magic Markdown, as I refuse to use anything subscription-based. But it is currently on the back burner while i finish Simulcast and a couple of other apps. For now, learning Markdown syntax and using a decent but simple markdown editor like Macdown would be my recommendation.

Pretty sure it's updated to work with modern macs. Macdown stopped development some time around 2020 or so. So somebody made a fork to keep it around.

https://macdown.app/

Says it's a universal binary, so it will work on 27 and up when they drop Rosetta support too.

It's not a good experience with VoiceOver. I see tables in the canned title page for their fiction templates, with contact info in the left column and word count in the right. I'm unsure what keyboard shortcut would move between columns. But if my cursor is in column 1, and I VO+F search for text in column 2, that does jump cursor to column 2.

You might try contacting Scrivener support about how to navigate tables using VoiceOver. I've had good conversations about accessibility with them previously, though I'm still waiting for bug fixes.

I played around with this. And indeed, tab and shift+tab move between cells in Scrivener. But it's confusing for a few reasons.

The main problem is that VoiceOver doesn't announce the current column or row.

After pressing tab or shift+tab, where the cursor lands isn't intuitive. It seems to land at the end of the text within a cell.

Finally, if you're at the end of text within a cell and you press right arrow, the cursor leaves the cell. But this isn't announced by the screen reader, and where you go isn't entirely clear to me. I would need to play with it more, and I just don't have the patience to reverse-engineer it.

So, it's a bit of a mess. Sorry.

I I use Textedit for most of my writing. It supports all the basic word processing needs without all the overhead of Word or Pages.

I like that it can work in a formatted text mode or a plain text mode. It has the continous scrolling style I like and it export to word without trouble.

The one thing I miss is word count. For some reason they have left that out of an otherwise robust and compact app.

I also use Ulyses and like it a lot, but I tend to use text edit when I need to share formatted documents with MS word users.

I don’t believe the import functionality of Ulysses is as sophisticated as its export functionality, and it doesn’t have change tracking beyond snapshot backups. That said, it extends Markdown with comment blocks along with insertion and deletion marks that are added manually.

The best, if not a little messy, method to deal with this is to use pages along side ulysses. Pages handles annotations and comments pretty well. it does mean you're working between two documents, the annotated one and the master, but I think this is the cleanest way to do it at the moment.

I do a lot of work with Track Changes and Comments, from both editors and critique group partners.

My preferred method for working with these features is Google Docs, which has an intuitive and accessible method for working with change/comment bubbles (which appear visually in the right margin, or at least they did back when I had enough eyesight to see them). Docs also has keyboard shortcuts to announce anchor text or announce comment text. Very nice and easy to use.

Google Docs and MS Word are very compatible for these features. Track Changes is called Suggested edits in Docs.

Google Docs main problem is that the keyboard shortcuts for moving to next and previous change or comment are ungainly. I addressed this with an Automator Workflow. And there is no keyboard shortcut to accept or reject a change, which means you have to futz with the UI.

I recently upgraded from Sequoia to Tahoe, and have noticed some regressions in text selection and comment handling.

Selecting text is now quite painful, as Pages announces the formatting, such as "body," before each selected element (character, word, line, whatever), sometimes also including the word "selected" in the announcement. If selecting a single word "test," for example, VoiceOver might announce "selected body test" rather than simply "test." This really slows text selection.

When reading by paragraph with Option+Down Arrow, if you come to a paragraph with a comment in the middle, VoiceOver sometimes skips the text before the comment, announcing only the comment anchor text and the text that follows it.

I'm not yet at the editting stage for my novel but will probably jump into windows through parallels to tidy. There are some useful features in windows word that you don't get on the mac side, beyond the fact NVDA etc play a lot better with windows word than voiceover with mac word.

Really, aside from the helpful way we can organise documents in ulysses, all of the mac solutions come with compromises requiring work arounds. As far as I've been able to ascertain, word on windows and NVDA removes many of these problems and, if you want to stay on mac, which makes sense, then running it through a VM might be the set and forget option.

I saw a previous commenter who was also writing a novel. I am also writing one. I do use ulysses on both the iPhone and the mac, only because, it's one of the only editors that actually plays well with a braille display on the iPhone. I've tested word extensively on the iPhone, and it is beyond horrific. Now, perhaps, that could be because the document I was testing with was pretty long, but that should still not be an excuse for it to jump around and turn words into gibberish. absolutely disgusting. Not to make operating system comparisons here, but one thing android was good at, and in the braille world it wasn't good for much, but it didn't matter the app. you put your cursor somewhere, that cursor would stay there. now, your focus, especially in google docs, was horrible, but the cursor, just, stayed there.