Scholarly writing with Editorial

mcburton

Hey Editorialists!

I'm new to the forum, but have been loving Editorial since it was released. I'm posting because I am curious to know if there are any other users out there using Editorial for scholarly writing. To help with my own academic work, I've written two workflows that might be of interest to any other scholarly-types on this forum.

One for searching your Zotero library and adding cites to a local BibTeX file
Another for inserting Citekeys from a local BibTex file
The two workflows are meant to work together (if you couldn't tell) to produce Pandoc ready documents & citation files. I am still testing the Pandoc transformation stuff, so I'm not sure how well that part of it works yet. I'm still tinkering (heavily) with both of these workflows, but I wanted to share them so people could test them, modify them, and break them.

Let me know in this thread or on Twitter (@mcburton) about any bugs.

cheers.

mjakubowiak

Thanks for your BibTex workflow, it's great. I'm using it with a BIB database I use with Bibdesk on Mac. It would be great to search the file by author or title, but I'm happy to have any options at all.

jwarren

Thanks for these workflows! I also use Editorial for scholarly writing, but I've not yet used Editorial from start to finish on a writing project. I usually set up a project in Scrivener, sync it to Dropbox, do preliminary writing with Editorial, and then deal with the citations and other final details back in Scrivener. I'm excited about the options of using Editorial for citations as well, so I'll play around with these workflows when I get the chance. I also use Editorial for all of my class notes and for updating my course web site (I use the dropbox hosted sitebox.io and pancake.io).

krshort

Using for two papers right now one in netSec and one in maths. Only problem I am running into is text justification. I always use justify text on left and right but I cant find a way to do that inside the app. Anyone aware of a way to make this happen?

abbad0n

The only text justification in MMD I know of is in tables:

http://rawgit.com/fletcher/human-markdown-reference/master/index.html

MD itself doesn't support justification in its syntax. However there is still hope. You just need to add some inline HTML (using the CSS text-align property in a DIV tag probably - see below link for issues using block tags in MD):

http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html

Also, if you know how to use LaTeX you might want to take a look at Texpad on the App Store. Since version 1.6.2 it has full MD support. Take your MD document, copy to Texpad, have it convert document, modify document as needed, and convert to PDF or print. Of course this may be overkill for your needs.

*(Not associated with Texpad in any way. Just a happy user.)

manuguerra

Hi @mcburton,

Thanks for your bibtex workflow, I happily use it with Papers 3 for iOS (which can now export bib files).
It is part of my academic writing together with my md->html_tex workflow. If interested, my workflow is able to create html and tex files taking care of local and remote images, tables, formulas, etc.
The html file can then be opened in another app or uploaded to a web service (e.g. for students or collaborators), while the tex project is zipped with the images and can be then be imported in TexPad or TexWriter.
Both papers and presentations are supported. For presentations, deck is required (either locally or on the remote server) for html files and beamer is used for tex files.

Cheers

wcaleb

Great thread! I have a workflow, Send to Docverter that might be relevant here. Docverter is a web service that uses Pandoc under the hood, so my workflow can (with an Internet connection) convert from Markdown, HTML, Latex to MD, HTML, Tex, PDF (using Flying Saucer), EPUB, or even DOCX.

I'm hoping soon to add Pandoc's template capabilities, but unfortunately Docverter does not support Pandoc's citation features.

TutorialDoctor

Ive just made a workflow called Highlighter which allows you to use CSS to style markdown.

This particular workflow allows you to highlight a specified keyword and change it's color, and it's background color, but it can be adapted to change the color of selected text also. Also I am working on a Justification workflow to align text (based on this workflow.)

MartinPacker

How does the styling work, in MD / CSS / HTML terms?

Might be especially helpful for Evernote if it's compliant.

TutorialDoctor

I've uploaded a text decoration workflow as well as a marker workflow. (For underlining and strike-troughs).

Any text in the editor can be wrapped in an html tag. Then all you have to do is add an inline CSS
style attribute.

At first I thought I had to covert markdown to html, but I was pleasantly surprised that the editor's preview window for markdown picked up the html tags.

I am not sure how it displays it, but it does!

More formatting workflows to come! I will do tables eventually.

krshort

Awesome! Thanks!

TutorialDoctor

`# My workflows for scholarly writing:

Justify

sets font color, alignment, and font size of the selected text.

Format

makes bold, italic, underlined, ~~strike-through~~, >blockquote, snippet , superscript, subscript, or overline the selected text.

Marker

Marks the selected text, as with a yellow highlighter.

Highlighter

changes the text color/background-color of a use-specified word.

The forum doesn't show the markdown as it was in the preview. Just copy and paste this post into a markdown document to see the partial results.

chorn

This should be a great addition but I can't get this to work. It keeps telling me that I need to put in the user and key even after placing these in the proper place in the script.

TutorialDoctor

I am working on an APA and MLA workflow for creating a bibliography page. APA is done, just need to finish the MLA part.

aminatelli

TutorialDoctor, any chance you'd make a Chicago/Turabian footnote & bibliography tool?

Or maybe just share how you'd go about building a footnote generator that pops up, requests info, then formats & inserts it properly. I can poke around and figure out how to get it to Chicago/Turabian. The Workflow actions and Python are daunting for an utter newbie.

I can see the ridiculous power we have at our fingertips in Editorial, but most of that power is at the top of a fairly steep learning curve. I'll get there. Slowly.

TutorialDoctor

Hi aminatelli. I am always looking for workflows to make, and also for ways to speed up that process. Also, I try to make that curve not so steep for newcomers, so I have posted nearly 100 workflows. I have a few tutorial workflows as well.

Your request sounds like a challenge I'll take. It shouldn't be too hard.

All of my workflows can be used for learning also (I try to design them that way).

Take care.

Tutorial

APA & MLA (in progress)

aminatelli

ooo, thank you!

*downloading your files now for learning purposes

~andrew

Porqupine

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