Markx

Markdown editor for scientific writing. Batteries included.

Why Markx?

Markdown has recently become popular among academics as a way to produce scientific documents. When paired with document conversion engines such as pandoc, it provides an easy and powerful way to write. Being a simple plain-text markup language, Markdown is easy to learn, and can be handled by version control systems. We decided to build Markx as to make markdown writing a collaborative effort that could be hosted as web service. For additional discussion, see these blog posts:

Features

Free as in free speech - promotes open science, pre-publication review, collaboration.
Free as in free beer - uses open-source, free software and released under CC-NC-BY 3.0.
Easy to learn - Markdown is not LaTex, for better and worse.
Integration with GitHub - free hosted version control, ideal for backup, versioning and collaboration.
Pandoc integration - multiple Markdown extensions, multiple output formats.
Real-time Markdown preview - WYSIWYM / WYSIWYG.
Display math with LaTeX formatting - $x^2+y^2=r^2$.
Citations - BibTeX: [@Drake1991]

Code highlighting:

 if __name__ == '__main__':
     # Bind to PORT if defined, otherwise default to 5000.
     port = int(os.environ.get('PORT', 5000))
     app.run(host='0.0.0.0', port=port, debug=app.debug)

Local host option with a limited number of dependencies - for offline editing on the train and in the airplane
Remote host option at http://markx.herokuapp.com/ - no installation required
By scientists, for scientists

Development Status

Markx is currently in development but can be used locally (see Installation instructions below) or remotely at http://markx.herokuapp.com.

It is still experimental, so take care of your data!

We would love to get feedback from anyone using it - Please open an issue with any bug or suggestion. If you can't open an issue please contact Yoav on twitter (you can use the #markx hashtag).

Technology

Server side (this is what you need to install if you run it on localhost):
- Python with Flask and requests
- Pandoc - optional, for conversion to PDF, DOCX etc.
Client side (no installation required):
- PageDown - Stack Overflow's Markdown editor
- Google Code Prettifier - Code highlighting
- MathJax - Rendering of $LaTeX$ equations
- BibTeX-js - Processing BibTeX citations
- Twitter Bootstrap with [Glyphicons Free]
- Github.js - integration with GitHub
3rd Party services:
- GitHub - version control hosting
- Docverter - online conversion of Markdown to multiple formats (currently, citations are not supported)
- LaTeX-Online - online compilation of LaTeX to PDF

Install locally

Clone this repository
Install Python - developed with version 2.7
Install Flask and requests: pip install Flask requests
Optionally install Pandoc
Run Markx by calling python server.py and pointing your browser at http://localhost:5000.
Load a BibTeX file with your citation library by choosing Load a Bibliography File from the Bibliography menu

More help can be found in the help file.

neitsab/markx