Writing a Long Paper

A paper is not one page and it is not only the draft. Around the draft sit the things you need while writing it: the marked-up manuscript your editor sent back, the journal's guidelines, a sample paper you are matching, the interview transcripts, and the thoughts that outgrew this paper and belong to the next one. An academic who trialled MojoPad put a number on it without meaning to — in his own project the draft was eight items out of twenty-eight. The paper is the smallest thing in the workspace.

So MojoPad does not ask you to make a "project". A paper is a folder. Put the sections in it in the order they will be read; put everything else in folders beside it. Nothing is special, which is the point: the same tree, the same pages, the same search.

The writing view

View ▸ Writing View arranges the app for exactly this job and nothing else. Your folder tree on the left, the section you are writing in the middle, and down the right, about that section:

• What this section is about — a line or two saying what it is meant to do. Shown wherever the page is listed, so a folder of stubs reads as a plan. Never appears in the writing, and never leaves the app.
• Words — a target you set, and how close you are, with a bar that fills. Per section, not per document, because that is the unit you actually write in.
• Notes to yourself — check the figure, ask Sara about the 2019 data, borrowed from the grant application. Yours alone: searchable here, never exported, never printed.
• Footnotes — this section's notes as cards beside the paragraph rather than at the foot of the page. Click one and the page jumps to it.
• From the rest of your wiki — described below, and the reason for all of this.

The strip follows the cursor: move to another section and it is about that section instead.

The reach without the filing

Everything above this point Scrivener has had for twenty years. This is the part it cannot do.

As you write, MojoPad reads what is in front of you and offers what else in your wiki belongs beside it — notes, quotations, pages, and the PDFs and books in your library, because their text is read and indexed too. Not by folder, not by tag, not by anything you remembered to file: by meaning. The list changes as you move between sections.

The academic above described the problem before he had seen the answer: "later, when working on another paper, I remember writing notes that would can be used, but I cannot remember which app I had written them in." That is the tax every researcher pays for notes spread across apps and folders and years. Here there is nothing to remember, because there was nothing to file.

Click one and it opens beside your draft, not instead of it — the split pane, with your sentence still where you left it. This needs a local embedding model; MojoPad tells you in the strip if one is missing, and nothing leaves your Mac either way.

More than two things at once

Two panes are not always enough — translating a quotation wants the source, the draft and the translation. Right-click any page ▸ Open in Small Window, then click the ✎ pen in that window's header: the card becomes a full editor, with the same formatting controls and the same Find and Replace as the main window. The eyeglasses turn it back into a clean reading card.

Each card is its own window, so open as many as you like and put them where you want — across two displays if you have them. Drag one wider and the formatting bar uses the room.

What goes in the paper, and what does not

Compile walks the folder in order, so the binder order is the paper's order: front matter first, sections in the middle, references and any closing abstract last. Depth decides heading level. See Compiling a Long Document.

Things that must not appear in the output have three ways out, and it is worth knowing which is which:

• Notes to yourself and What this section is about never export or print, from anywhere. They are not part of the writing.
• Skip on export (in the page's Info) keeps a page in the folder but out of the output — the offcut you are not sure about yet.
• A folder outside the paper — Research, Future Paper, whatever you call it — is simply not compiled, because Compile is given one folder.

Getting it out

Compile writes a new page in the wiki, a PDF, a Word file, Markdown, or plain text. For a paper the PDF is the one that matters, and Settings ▸ Files & Backups ▸ Paper sets page size, margins, line spacing, typeface and page numbers so it comes out looking like a paper rather than a printed web page.

Journals increasingly ask authors for a ready-for-print PDF rather than a Word file, to save the cost of professional layout. That makes the PDF settings worth a few minutes before you need them, not after.