

If you already use vim or Emacs as a word processor, you probably already know you don’t need Atom, which I chose for its ease of use.
The plain text workflow install#
I’ll assume here that you can install the software listed above on your system, and we’ll get into Pandoc and Markdown in the drafting section. I thought this post would be helpful to colleagues who are interested in the portability and openness of plain text (and share some combination of the needs I list above), but who’d like to see what the editor and workflow might look like before committing to a change. If that’s not you, I very highly recommend Scrivener for organizing your academic writing and research. This guide will work for you if you feel comfortable using or trying the command line. What follows is a guide for using these tools in a workflow for writing in Markdown with citation management, converting documents with Pandoc, and doing other processing in Atom and on the command line. Since this post became, judging by my site analytics, my most popular piece of writing, I’m updating it after a little less than a year using it on a daily basis.

The plain text workflow pdf#
pdf files or to incorporate mathematics or other technical information in. Optionally, one can add a LaTeX suite in order to output typeset. Neither Word nor Scrivener could do all three, and after asking for advice (references and acknowledgements below), I decided to use a new set of tools for working in plain text: Pandoc with Pandoc-Citeproc for document and bibliography conversion, Zotero with BetterBibTex for reference management, and Atom as a text editor for writing in Pandoc’s version of Markdown.

