icosilune

Archive: December 8th, 2008

Further adventures in paper writing

[General] (12.08.08, 11:58 pm)

I have been working on a paper for my cognitive science course, and that has been going well, but not quickly. The paper was turned in while somewhat incomplete. I will post it when it is done.

While I have not yet found a stable paper writing system yet, I have made progress. I am leaning toward Docbook for final products. It is intended for books rather than papers, which is an irritating flaw, but it does come with a large set of XSL transformations to transform a docbook document into a variety of formats. Its export to HTML is promising: sections are all classified with “class” attributes, so transformed documents can be very easily styled. For the daily practice of writing, I’m happily chugging along with Google Docs.

When I say writing system, I mean something that handles writing, document formatting/typesetting, and dealing effectively with citations. While I have previously adored LaTex and BibTeX, the formats are very ill supported. If anyone ever finds a LaTeX editor that isn’t terrible, please let me know. While I have previously been unimpressed with Zotero, it is pretty effective as a reference manager. With references, I want something that I can have work with my bibliography, but that’s really dependent on the openness of the reference format and my ability to get my homebrew readings plugin to behave nicely.