Zotero and Ulysses 3: does it worth a try?

Kostiantyn Gorobets

Hello there!

I am in the middle of choosing the powerful writing instrument for a large monograph in international law. I am basically choosing between Scrivener and Ulysses. I know that Scrivener offers huge possibilities and that's what actually disturbing me. All I need is a stable plain text editor with the possibility to work on mobile device as well (it is optional though). However I am not sure if Ulysses work well with Zotero which is my main reference manager (I also use Papers for organizing PDFs). So I am wondering does workflow on Ulysses is similar to Scrivener? I mean, all I need for Ulysses is my Juris-M and ODF-scan plug-in?

I found this topic here with the relevant issue: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/32597/ulysses-iii-and-zotero-experiences
Discussion went to Pandoc questions very fast there :) Any updates since then?

adamsmith

no real updates, no. I'd probably more strongly advocate using pandoc even more strongly now then two years ago, though. There are a number of improved tools available that make this even more convenient.

Kostiantyn Gorobets

Honestly, Pandoc looks very geeky for me. Reminds me of LaTeX, which I could never handle with. I do like WYSIWYM paradigm for plain text editors. But working in terminal is not what I am after.

So as I can see the main problem of Ulysses is that it does not support ODF export?

adamsmith

yes, that'd be the issue (and mean that you'd have to roundtrip through LibreOffice every time you want to compile, which sounds rather annoying).

As for Pandoc, you wouldn't be "working" in a terminal -- you would have one command to compile your document that you have to figure out exactly once, and then all you do is copy&paste that and change the file name going forward.
It's up to you in the end, but if you're looking for a workflow to write a longer work and you want to use anything other than a WYSWYG word processor, getting used to pandoc is an hour well spend.