![]() There are lots of resources online for learning Markdown but David Sparks and Eddie Smith’s The MacSparky Markdown Field Guide is very fine indeed. It is simple to learn, flexible, and doesn’t require any special software (just a text editor). Markdown is, quite simply, brilliant to write in. For example, I can quickly add an idea to a book chapter I am writing using my phone which will then be available when I go back to editing the book on my computer. I can write on a laptop, a tablet or phone, and then these can all sync automatically. I can get stuck into the process of writing without getting lost in the formatting power of applications like MS word.There will never be a time when computers can’t read a text file, whereas even documents I wrote in the 1990s are no longer accessible to my current computers Text files ensure backward and forward compatibility. ![]() The key here is writing in text files using Markdown. Any academic or aspiring academic who is not familiar with one form of citation software is making a very big mistake. These applications do, however, cost money (DEVONthink is pricey), and with students I tend to suggest using Evernote as a way of processing information, combined with their University’s citation software (Roehampton University uses Refworks which is painful to use compared with Papers). Generally speaking, I also tend to avoid database-based systems where possible (what happens if that supplier goes out of business?) but DEVONthink has strong artificial intelligence features for linking diverse ideas that make it worth my while. But, although iAnnotate has rather clunky sync services (across Dropbox) I really like its annotation tools and how these notes get synced with the PDFs. For example, I could add notes to references in Papers, and read PDFs stored in Papers on the iPad. Points 3, 4 and 5 are the major redundancies in this system.
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