Adding features for academic writing

chinovelasco commented 7 years ago

Just wondering why not add support for tools like Zotero that make this tool a feasible alternative for academical writing

olivierkes commented 7 years ago

What would you need exactly?

As of now, you can use pandoc to export from manuskript, and pandoc supports bibtex I think, so you can use manuskript for academic writing.

But what would be handy to simplify usage?

ejkozan commented 7 years ago

Probably easy possibility to use something like that (adding citation as easy as in word and libreoffice) :)

Great software, hope it will be better that Scrivener

olivierkes commented 7 years ago

I want to support academic writing more than we do now, sure! But I've never used zotero and libreoffice/word. (For my academic writing I used JabRef where I would copy the key, and then paste it in latex or markdown manually.)

So please, can you describe with a bit more details what you expect? I cannot guess :)

Great software, hope it will be better that Scrivener

Thanks :) Still a long way to go in terms of features, and yet manuskript is already much better than Scrivener: it's Free ;)

ejkozan commented 7 years ago

I'm myself chemist, and I was looking for alternatives with I can use for writing my PhD ;) Scrivener have one problem: old beta for Linux that was forgotten by developers :P

As for academic writing, things that should be there if you want Manuskript to be used for writing scientific papers, and books (from my point of view :P) → some kind of support for reference management software. Copy pasting reference keys is tedious. When I have hundred positions in paper or few hundreds in review or book chapter, it is just hell to do it more manual way, or format them by hand. As support I mean possibility for free programs (like Zotero or Mendeley) to put citations directly into Manuskript. It can be done in Scrivener (http://davepwsmith.github.io/academic-scrivener-howto/) question is if it can be done for Manuskript.

By the way, I don't know if you know, but there is very similar app, but more for researchers (and MacOS only) called Manuskript :P https://www.manuscriptsapp.com/ → Possibility to put images/figures/objects. For academic writing, I don't need to see formatted pages, but I need to have figures, schemes or charts directly in text. It is hard to write about them when... i don't see them :)

olivierkes commented 7 years ago

Thanks @ejkozan, that's useful !

Reference management

It can be done in Scrivener (http://davepwsmith.github.io/academic-scrivener-howto/) question is if it can be done for Manuskript.

You can follow the exact same procedure with manuskript right now. (And by the way, I think that's what I was describing when I talked about copy/paste the key.)

I don't know what his applet can do (the description is vague), so if you use that could you describe it or post screenshots? My guess is that it calls zotero on the front to quickly find the reference.

My plans for the future, though:

Add the option in manuskript exporter to configure markdown to run his bibliography processing tool (something like the pandoc -s -S --normalize --bibliography ~/.pandoc/YOUR_BIBLIOGRAPHY.bib --csl ~/.csl/YOUR_CITATION_STYLE.csl -f markdown -t docx -o MYPROJECT.docx MYPROJECT.txt in the page you linked). So no need to export in two steps.
Allow linking of bibliographic file(s) in manuskript project, to be able to quickly search and insert the references from within the project; without having to switch software.
Recognize pandoc's markdown citations in the text so that moving the mouse over you get a tooltip description (and not just the key), and if you click it it opens in the bibliography manager.

But open to suggestions!

Images

Possibility to put images/figures/objects. For academic writing, I don't need to see formatted pages, but I need to have figures, schemes or charts directly in text. It is hard to write about them when... i don't see them :)

This has been asked a few times (cf. #22), and it will be done. But I must confess: though I see the use, I don't see the absolute need. For my master thesis I didn't work with images but lots of PDFs I had to see while writing, and I simply.... opened a PDF viewer next to my text editor :)

But I see the need to have those images in the project folder (for images that are exported in the document), and so I will add the ability to manage them within manuskript (as well as PDF, and maybe other formats as well).

For that, I'm doing important code clean-up and refactoring on branch feature/refactoring, that will allow me to add such features much more easily.

Manuscripts

By the way, I don't know if you know, but there is very similar app, but more for researchers (and MacOS only) called Manuskript :P https://www.manuscriptsapp.com/

w.o.w. That's crazy! We started at about the same time, with the same idea, and almost the same name. :) And their soft look awesome (though not free, so that's one more point manuskript will always hae in advance ;p) Thanks for telling me!

olivierkes / manuskript