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
I understand the context in which you’re responding. It’s a learning curve to adjust to a new writing environment that would be more apparent to students now, considering the last time they have learned about the editors they’re switching from was years ago. Since OP is compiling a list of alternatives rather than one recommended product for graduate students studying OT and psychology, there’s no harm in having LaTeX (+ editor) as one of those options. Considering the improved language support, templates, and the different editors out there for LaTeX, the barrier isn’t as steep as coding from scratch IMO. People learn, it’s not a big deal.
Sure, LyX has (had?) its quirks and isn’t bug-free, but so did Excel with parsing gene names into dates for years, leading to scientists renaming genes as a bypass until MS provided a solution in 2023.