An editor for academic papers (xml, html, md, TeX, pdf and if you really need it rtf)

editor, txt editor, xml

The problem is well known. How should an academic - and I speak here specifically for humanities researchers - write a paper? Is there a perfect tool for this?

Ok, I think everybody agrees that Microsoft Word is not an option for many reasons: too complicated, not trustworthy in the way it handles the coding of data, proprietary, and most of all not adapted for the needs of academics.

My preferred tool is LaTeX, but it is too complicated for most humanities scholars. And it has another big problem: it does not allow a basic xml markup.

Why do I need a new writing tool?

I explain what are the fundamental needs for me:

A way to do this is suggested by Nikola Sander here

And it works. She suggests to use markdown and then pandoc to convert markdown - plus some not so complicated way to manage bibliographies.

But in this way it is impossible to manage xml.

Now, some good tools that one can use to realize my idea:

  1. LaTeX
  2. pandoc
  3. Markdown
  4. Qute
  5. Wymeditor
  6. brackets
  7. Diffmerge
  8. CWRC-Writer

My idea is to use a basic editor, like Qute, based on html or markdown, implementing the possibility of adding xml metadata in an easy way and then using pandoc in order to convert to all the other formats.

A possibility is to make an online and offline editor which allows also a quick online publication - after having selected a server and a database.

All suggestions are welcome!

editor, txt editor, xml Atelier, Numérique