David Sanson

Writing

I write most everything—webpages, research articles, notes—in MacVim, using Pandoc’s extended flavor of markdown. I strongly recommend this over Word or LaTeX. In the words of Michael Thompson:

The paucity of means is the greatest virtue of markdown and pandoc markdown.

It is strangely difficult to get people to see the point, but the defects of LaTeX for concentration, writing and thought, are at least as great as those of Word, for the simple reason that it gives the writer too much power; there is always another package to call in the preamble, as there is always another drop down menu in Word. In either LaTeX and Word the writer is at each instant faced with the possibility of, say, breaking out into 30 pt Comic Sans (…hmm, Comic Sans, might need XeTeX here…). LaTeX has the further defect that the thought-destroying “fine control” it gives you is so much more interesting than what’s in a drop-down menu.

In markdown - not to put too fine a point on it - the writer is only ever faced with one question, and it is the right one: what the next sentence should be.

If you use both Vim and pandoc, you might be interested in the vim-pandoc plugin, which I co-wrote and co-maintain.

Version Control

Academics should learn to use version control. If you write in a plain text format, like markdown or LaTeX, you can use git. For more on using git in the context of writing philosophy papers, see Mark Kalderon’s Blog and the PhilTeX blog.

Bibliographic Data

The best tool for downloading bibliographic data is Zotero. The best tool for organizing and maintaining bibliographic data and associated content (PDFs, ePubs, etc.), is BibDesk. Zot2Bib gets Zotero to feed the data it downloads directly into BibDesk. Unfortunately, it does not also send along associated PDFs.

Reading

I use still use Skim to read PDFs, but Apple’s Preview.app is catching up. (This is the one thing that keeps me from adopting Linux: no adequate PDF viewer with support for annotations.)

When will we have adequate support for academic ePubs?

Other things