Report production -- two approaches

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Posted by Paul Korm
Jan 28, 2014 at 09:00 PM

Recent blog posts from Kieran Healy and Dr. Drang describing their respective report production techniques. This is at the back-end of the research-outline-notetaking-writing process and fine-tuned for each of their specific interests. But clever nonetheless.

Kieran Healy’s post is here http://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2014/01/23/plain-text/
and Dr Drang’s is here http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2014/01/my-report-writing-workflow/

Posted by Dr Andus
Jan 28, 2014 at 11:23 PM

Paul Korm wrote:
Recent blog posts from Kieran Healy and Dr. Drang describing their
>respective report production techniques.

Interesting, thanks for posting this. The commonalities and principles seem to be:

1) write in plain text.
2) use markdown.
3) insert citations, images etc.
4) convert to LaTeX.
5) produce beautiful PDF.

While I’d love to use this process (as MS Word’s output looks very pedestrian compared to LaTeX - just check how pretty Kieran’s PDF looks: http://kieranhealy.org/files/drafts/performativity.pdf), the sad reality is that it takes quite an effort to learn LaTeX, and then most academic publishers demand a Word file anyway.

Nonetheless, one could adopt some aspects of the above process even if it ends up in Word. My version of it is:

1) write in plain text using markdown (WriteMonkey);
2) paste in and edit raw EndNote field codes as plain text (for the academic references).
3) export to Word.
4) convert EndNote codes into formatted references and bibliography (using EndNote plug-in in Word).
5) finalise headings, styles etc. in Word.

Learning the 5 or 6 different EndNote codes needed for this is a lot less demanding than mastering LaTeX.

Why not just write it all in Word? As I mentioned it in another post, once you have hundreds of EndNote references in a 30-page paper, writing and editing in Word becomes very slow and cumbersome. Fiddling with formatting also distracts from the writing process itself.

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