Comments on: Things I want in an academic writing workflow

By: Thibaud

Thibaud — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 14:09:30 +0000

You can use DevonThink Pro to store all your documents. It is AppleScriptable and reliable.
The learning curve is not the same than the Zotero’s one, but I think it is worth the effort and rewarding.

By: Sharri Pun

Sharri Pun — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 17:34:32 +0000

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By: Graham Webster

Graham Webster — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 23:45:18 +0000

Thanks for your comment, Neil. I have friends and colleagues who are happy to use emacs and the like, but I really do value looking at nicely formatted text. Perhaps it is a defect, but in my experience as an editor I have become accustomed to viewing the “final” product and editing it live, rather than writing mark-up. I’m not scared of writing mark-up myself, but for large documents I simply like to be able to see things as they will print (or as they will arrive in PDF.)

So I suppose I think it’s a personal characteristic whether a word processor adds to productivity or not. For you it may not matter. For me, the absence of WYSIWYG is a distraction.

By: Neil Kelly

Neil Kelly — Sat, 05 Mar 2011 22:17:34 +0000

The real trade-off is not this feature versus that feature, but how much time and energy am I willing to put into learning-the-Leggo(r) versus, how much I want to let my mind run forward on my current thesis/project topic.

All of this power is at your fingertips with old skool editors like emacs and vi(m). All the dongle clutter of word processors does not add to your productivity in research and writing. The subtle adjective “customizable” attached to both these old editors, refers to a code/hack library of pluggable/installable/modifiable extensibility that will do all of the above and more.

I use emacs with Org-mode, but do *not* recommend it to those who prefer to whine to technical support rather than work-it-out-for-yer-feckin-self.
http://zenandtheart.com/
http://orgmode.org/

By: Graham Webster

Graham Webster — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 13:39:22 +0000

@Sebastian: Thanks for the info, and especially for telling me about LyX. This I imagined must exist but never found in my medium-effort searches.

The hard thing for me is whether to invest time and experience in Mendeley or to hold my breath for the advertised Zotero desktop client…

By: Sebastian

Sebastian — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 13:33:34 +0000

Some of these are trade-offs of course: E.g. I’d say that Zotero Ooo integration is better and more stable than Mendeley’s, but Zotero doesn’t fulfil your 2nd criteria.

Anyway – for word processor you might have a look at Lyx – it’s a LaTeX based, quasi WYSIWYG editor that’s GUI based. I know Zotero better than Mendeley, so I know that Zotero directly integrates with Lyx using a plugin called LyZ, but since Mendeley has very tight BibTeX integration, I’m sure that would work well, too.
http://www.lyx.org/
unsurprisingly it’s free and open source.