David Sanson

Writing

If you are fed up with Microsoft Word and thinking about drinking the LaTeX koolaid, take a good hard look at pandoc first.

Pandoc is a command line tool that converts documents from one markup format to another. For academic writing, the key point is that it converts its own extended markdown into HTML, LaTeX, PDF, ePub, and OpenOffice. Pandoc’s extended markdown includes everything you need to write and structure a philosophy paper: footnotes, labeled propositions (i.e., “definition lists”), citations, diagrams, support for LaTeX maths… Anything you can’t do in pandoc’s markdown is probably something you shouldn’t be doing anyway.

For more on the virtues of writing in pandoc, see this post by Michael Thompson and this followup by John MacFarlane. Note that this exchange is a bit over a year old, and pandoc has since been extended to support the three features MacFarlane mentions: LaTeX macros, and non-continguous numbered example lists with labels that can be used as cross-references (this last is not as flexible or powerful as LaTeX’s support for cross-references: count that as one remaining shortcoming in pandoc for academic writers).

My preferred text editor is

I switched from TextMate to MacVim about 6 months ago, and haven’t looked back. TextMate is a wonderful text editor, with an easy learning curve and a lot of powerful features. But MacVim is just as powerful and more actively developed, and some flavor of vim is available on just about every platform, so I’ll never have to learn new keyboard shortcuts again.

When I just want to get something out without distraction, I use

But I miss vim’s normal mode in nvAlt. I’ve been playing with

But it isn’t sticking.

I’ve also been enjoying Terpstra’s

though I’m not yet convinced it will play an important role in my workflow.

As things progress, it is helpful to keep track of revisions. For this, I use

Git is version control software. If you write in plain-text, you should use this. For more on using git in the context of writing philosophy papers, see Mark Kalderon’s Blog and the PhilTeX blog.

Research

I am hoping that Zotero Standalone is the first step toward a clean and simple OS X client. For now, I use

which bypasses Zotero’s client, and sends scraped data directly to

Unfortunately, it does not send the PDF along as well.

BibDesk is a great piece of software, but it is also a bit frustrating. BibTeX is an aging bibilographic database format, and BibDesk’s web scraping and export options leave a lot to be desired.

For reading and annotating PDFs, I use

Apple’s Preview.app keeps getting better though. I’m not sure how much better Skim is at this point.

Other things

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