Any suggestions for using Scrivner to write a family history book

[bobproct]

The book will have an outline with names of individuals, and then filled in with photos, sources, charts, and reports. What is the easiest and fastest way to do this? I plan to use Scrivner on my MAC.

[KirkS]

Scrivener seems like a good choice. I hope you will provide updates and feedback as you go through this process.

Are you planning to create a book in Reunion, export it as a PDF, then import the PDF into Scrivener?

If it were me, I think I'd try exporting multiple reports as DOCX or RTF and then use Scrivener to arrange the chapters.

I am especially interested to hear your feedback on how well Scrivener imports the DOCX and/or RTF files exported by Reunion. One frustration I have found is the endnotes exported by Reunion aren't actually encoded as Word endnotes.

[bobproct]

I am just starting on the book now and I'm in the document gathering phase. I do plan to give some status as I go ahead with Scrivner. I have 4 TB of Stuff from a family member's Reunion files and I'm getting rid of duplicate files now from his backup and research disks.

[KirkS]

I toyed with Scrivener many years ago on a coworker's Mac, but it wasn't relevant to my work, so I never really used it.

Based on your OP, and as I have investigated further, it is very impressive and obviously designed by writers. It looks like a great way to build a book from scratch and export to a variety of formats, including ePubs and press-ready PDFs.

I did find one surprising (in my opinion) weakness regarding images. Scrivener will allow you to insert images into your text, but it will not allow you to wrap text around the images. This is understandable for ePub layout, but for printed pages, I sometimes like to insert small photos in my document; e.g. a one-paragraph bio with a headshot anchored to the bio.

The inability to wrap text in Scrivener is covered in this short video: Scrivener: Adding Images to Text