![]() Pandoc also supports its own citation-generation system, which uses the Citation Style Language. (I also swear by ZotFile for corraling PDFs of articles.) ![]() There are some extensions to Zotero which help use Zotero and biblatex together: zot2bib or the much more elaborate Better BibTeX. For gathering citations from the web I use Zotero. The biblatex bibliographic database format is also plain text, but here I do sometimes use a graphical program, the excellent BibDesk, to manage it. The biblatex-chicago package is a beautifully executed implementation of the Chicago style I used it to generate the citations in my book and here, however many years on, it is still being kept up to date with new editions of the Chicago Manual. I use LaTeX’s extraordinarily sophisticated citation-generation system, biblatex. (LaTeX is the most widely used variety of TeX and the one ordinarily used by pandoc in making PDFs from markdown.) The Tex Stack Exchange is the first place to search for answers to specific questions-and to pose them to an occasionally testy though usually helpful community. Tobias Oetiker’s Not-So-Short Introduction to LaTeX2e is a good starting point for learning TeX. There are many resources on the website of the TeX Users Group, as well as links to download the software itself Mac users should use the MacTeX distribution. Once you have become sufficiently finicky, you will want to know more about TeX in order to take control of the typesetting process more fully. At a more advanced level of finickiness, I enjoy Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style. If you wish to convince yourself such things matter, you can do worse than Matthew Butterick’s Typography in Ten Minutes. TeX-created by the son of a printer-is far better at this than Word. TypesettingĪs a book person and general fussbudget, I care about typographic niceties like hyphenation, justification, footnote placement, and pagination. There is an excellent free book on git, Scott Chacon’s Pro Git. I use git to track the changes in all my writing, and I have even used it in a collaborative writing project. Working in plain text means I can use sophisticated version control software to keep track of my revisions. There are good free text editors that are more straightforward to use than either: BBEdit (free version) on Mac and Notepad++ on Windows. Both vim and emacs have excellent, baggy-monster-sized documentation and are potentially (dangerously) infinitely customizable. ![]() Others use the formidable emacs as an editor. That is to say that all the writing I do-of e-mails, markdown, LaTeX, HTML, R code for data analysis, R markdown for combined text and analysis-I do in MacVim. ![]() I edit text in MacVim, a Mac version of the venerable programmer’s text editor vim. The pandoc documention explains the ins and outs in great detail. I have a few notes on markdown on this site. Pandoc can, among many other things, automatically convert markdown to PDFs first it converts markdown to TeX, then it runs the TeX typesetting program to make a PDF. Originally conceived as a shorthand way of producing HTML for web pages, markdown can also be used to generate well-typeset PDFs thanks to pandoc. The extra signs replace the formatting commands one would use in Word. When I write, I write markdown, which is ordinary text plus a few special signs here and there. An eminently reasonable (and unself-satisfied) essay in that vein is the sociologist Kieran Healy’s Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science, which I recommend. Here are some notes on what I’ve been using lately. Somewhat more labor-intensive than ordinary word-processing-sometimes much more labor-intensive-using a system of this sort yields aesthetically superior results and a righteous feeling of self-satisfaction. The particular setup I use has changed somewhat over time, though the foundation has always been the TeX typesetting system. Such systems make better use of the capacities of the computer for managing all the information that goes into complex documents. I prepare my text using one program, then use others to produce the final document from that text. I abominate and despise Microsoft Word, and I long ago developed a preference for systems that separate the task of composing text from the task of typesetting the page.
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