TL;DR version: Plain text is fun, yo.
I’ve settled on a modified form of Markdown, with a few additions for comments and notes. I feel this provides a good compromise between TeX and Word for OS X, with more complex equations added in using TeX later (there’s a nice GUI client knocking about for this), to be inserted in the same manner as the diagrams/illustrations.
Good bits so far:
- It’s *fast*. Pages/Word often pinwheels on this machine. TextWrangler can handle huge amounts of text, way beyond what I’ll need for this.
- I don’t have to learn anything new for now: with deadlines looming scarily close, this is important. I find markdown very easy to just chuck out.
- It encourages good behaviour: whenever possible, I’m sticking to unicode characters.
- Because I can access several documents easily using the sidebar I’m quickly adding in references as I type, which makes the bibliography task a lot easier. As I’m handling less than 150 references, they have personal nicknames/IDs so I just refer to [n] and the second document has the nickname (which is also the name of the file).
- I can’t spend my time fiddling on the subheading fonts to distract myself from work - separating content from layout is great for this reason.
- I also find it much easier to see if I’m being an idiot in a monospaced font… blame irc for this.
- Teeny tiny files! Plus plain text can pretty much be opened everywhere, so along with backups there’s as small a chance of data loss as I can make. It can be easily uploaded to my server, or MobileMe if difficult situations occur.
Bad bits:
The references solution is not easily scalable. At the moment I’m relying on a large Notebook.app document (Circus Ponies software) where I’ve logged about 85% of the PDF references I’ve used (and the book ones too, which is pretty much why this document exists), along with summaries, citation in RSC style and the nickname I’ve given to the file (along with a link to re-download the article if required). To scale beyond the number of documents I have I’d require a better solution. For now, this is the compromise I’ve agreed on.
Ugly bits:
I’m considering creating a modified form of markdown for science/academic writers if I ever get this work done. The beauty of markdown is in its simplicity, so there will only be a few changes, if that (mainly extending the footnote feature, and including an official citation feature). Yes, this is ugly. You don’t want me touching code. Watching me code is like watching a kitten drive a car: it’s very cute to see my paws on the wheel and I look so happy in control of the car, but the owner of the house nearby wont be pleased when I arrive in their conservatory by driving into the side of it and then declaring “O HAI I HAZ WHEELS, PROPR DRIVER ME” in white Impact.
There should be a conclusion to this once I’ve submitted the project writeup, and probably amended again once I have my results. Until then: less Tumblr, more work. I’ve been good today, let it continue!
![jilllian:
thecaleb:
shanarama:
thedailywhat:
Life Hack of the Day: Quick + dirty cable organizer out of common household binder clips.
Brilliant.
[boingboing.]
ohmygod I’m doing this immediately.
I am alllll over that shit. Why did I never think of that before!?](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kzpcdbeuLh1qzpwi0o1_500.jpg)
