Citations with Scrivener, MultiMarkDown, BibDesk, and TeXShop

I’ve set up a nice writing environment for my Master’s thesis that uses the following tools:

  • Scrivener, an application for writers that support MultiMarkDown (MMD) syntax, which can compile to LaTeX.
  • BibDesk, a delicious-looking reference manager based on BibTeX. I use it to create the BibTeX library.
  • TeXShop, an OS X bundle that easily and quickly sets up a LaTeX environment (including GUI) on your Mac.

The instructions on the MMD developer’s website are clear, but gloss over the bibliography/reference process. Here are my notes:

  1. In Scrivener, with your document open, go into the File menu and open “MultiMarkDown Settings…”.
  2. Add an entry called “BibTeX” that contains the relative or absolute path to the BibTex library, excluding the file extension. This is the file that you’ve created and saved in BibTeX. No spaces are allowed in the path.
  3. Add an entry called “Bibliography Style” that contains the name of the citation style to use, or a relative or absolute path to the bibliographic style, excluding the file extension. You can find some epidemiological styles on the medepi website. No spaces are allowed in the path.

When you export your manuscript to LaTeX (by selecting “MultiMarkDown -> LaTeX” in the “Compile Draft” window), you’ll get a nice .tex file.

  1. Open the file in TeXShop.
  2. In the document’s toolbar, make sure that the drop-down is set to LaTeX and click “Typeset”.
  3. Set the drop-down to BibTex and click Typeset again
  4. Set it back to LaTeX and click it twice more.

Ridiculous, I know, but that’s apparently how you get LaTeX to include the citation information. Alternately, you can select Macros > Applescript > Bibliography, which automates the above steps (HT Alex Ruiz).

4 Comments

    • Author

      Alex Ruiz

    • Date

      July 19, 2010

    • Time

      10:59 am

    Nice set of instructions to use scrivener with LaTex. As for the part of compiling the bibliography, in Texshop, go to macros>applescript>bibliography that is a macro that will do all of the steps to compile the document with the bibliography included automatically.

  2. That's great, thanks for the tip.

    • Author

      Kimmie

    • Date

      July 21, 2010

    • Time

      5:26 pm

    I don't get it. Fly here and show me. y/y?

    • Author

      Nik Karpinsky

    • Date

      November 15, 2010

    • Time

      3:38 pm

    If you want to set a keyboard shortcut for the macro you can using the keyboard prefpane in system preferences. Go to Keyboard shortcuts, push the + button, then select texshop as the application and Bibliography as the menu title. I set mine to cmd+b which is the build shortcut in Xcode.

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