Hullo scientists, fellow researcher here with a question for peers:
Do you have any suggestions for closed-off writing software (no AI scraping, no school oversight, no cloud storage with mysterious and unknown security). As we are all aware, formatting an article can take as much effort as writing the damn thing some days, especially if you do not want to use Microsoft or Google for ethical and privacy reasons.
My peers and I work with a lot of students who want to study and work with vulnerable populations, the sort of populations that some companies and (shameful) universities are attempting to delete evidence of. I am attempting to address some concerns coming up in the classroom without putting my career at risk. What better way than with a lesson and a resource list for secure writing and storage tips?
The school doesn’t pay for a Microsoft license, and some students have expressed feeling unsafe and uncomfortable supporting google. I have suggested Libreoffice as its what I use but some of the students are really struggling with formatting their papers to academic standards in this software. Admittedly, I agree, Libre takes 7-14 steps to do some things google can do in two clicks. I would like to look into alternatives.
Most of the writing applications I’m seeing both free and paid tend to be for creative writers or note taking and I am not seeing tools to make running titles or easily format your sources.
What are you all using, do you have recommendations? I
Seconding LaTeX. It’s kind of the standard for scientific writing. If you want to give them a head start toward that end, it’s the go to.
I will point out that it’s not an editor but more like a format. It’s kind of like HTML in that your document (without a WYSIWYG editor) looks like raw text with some codeword markup. This means there’s a bit of a learning curve. But once you run it through the processor it will spit out professional and good looking documents. I have co-workers in a very MS Word dominated environment that would love to write everything in LaTeX.
You can also find open source WYSIWYG editors to make it easier for them to get started.