• sandalbucket@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Had to write a paper in college with 100 citations.

    We used zotero for citation management, and it would dump a bibtex file on demand.

    The paper was written in markdown, stored in git, and rendered through pandoc. We would cite a paper with parentheses and something resembling an id, like (lewis).

    We gave pandoc a “citation style definition”, and it took care of everything. Every citation was perfectly formatted. The bibliography was perfectly formatted. Inline references were perfect. Numbering was perfect. All the metadata was ripped from pdfs automatically. It was downright magical.

    • hinterlufer@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      yep, markdown is a great alternative to LaTeX if you don’t need fancy layouts or anything special

      • sandalbucket@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Markdown + pandoc means it goes through an intermediary latex template on the way to pdf land - which means your markdown can be a bastardized mix of markdown, html, latex commands, and sometimes more ;)

    • TheChargedCreeper864@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      This is what I (a non coder who only knows git “download the Yuzu repo before they nuke it” and git “give me all the updates”) want to do when I get to write a paper. How much git did you have to learn to do this?

      • prashanthvsdvn@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        This is just basic make changes to file, git add and commit workflow. Other features of git like branching can be leveraged for greater control but are optional. What makes it magical is 3 seperate systems working together with such symphony namely git, Zotero and pandoc. Zotero is citation manager that you can use store scientific articles, papers, thesis etc. and it can produce a bibliography file and pandoc can reference those along with the citations in the make file to create a clean typesetted Word or LaTeX pdf with precise numbering, table of contents, citations and bibliography with correct format without you needing to edit anything.