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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • 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.


  • prashanthvsdvn@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzLPT Do it.
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    7 months ago

    Markdown and pandoc are like match made in heaven for this. If you didn’t know, Markdown is plain text file, has a simple syntax for formatting (that gets carried over when you use pandoc), supports LaTeX equations and can attach metadata as yaml part on top of the file (gives custom usability when pandoc works on it) and supports citations w/ a bibliography file. And pandoc is document converter between multiple formats and can produce word files, PowerPoints, html file, latex pdfs (book, report, Beamer presentations) etc. You can also provide a template for pandoc to work with and it produces in that format. Not to mention since it’s plain text, you can apply git version control and also use make files to iteratively compile new outputs.

    There is also RMarkdown (or it’s newer successor Quartro), which is same markdown pipeline but also can compute codes inside a section and attaches the result to the markdown file and does the whole pandoc thing afterwards. Think of it as like Jupyter Notebook style of literate programming with Markdown. Here’s a demonstration of its capabilities. https://youtu.be/_D-ux3MqGug

    Assuming your colleagues can work with git but not LaTeX, you can set up a git repo with just markdown files and collaborate on that and have a makefile or docker container to get the final word or pdf generated. Here’s a good example of an pandoc makefile https://gist.github.com/kristopherjohnson/7466917

    In Worst case scenario that they only work with word files, you can generate one from your markdown files and share with them and pull down the changes they sent you on the word document.

    P.S. I assume Org-Mode can also substitute Markdown here in the pipeline. But I haven’t committed to it, so I’m not fully sure.