simple-essay

This repository provides a bare minimum of files to generate a tidy academic paper with markdown that, nevertheless, is published as both a Microsoft Word .docx and as a .pdf (see output.docx and output.pdf respectively). The conversion is done by the universal document converter, Pandoc, and the typesetting for the .pdf is done with TeX.

Prerequisites

Please have installed, for maximal compatibility with this README:

Git, for getting these files and putting your own essay under version control.
Atom, for editing your plain text files.
Pandoc, for converting Markdown to Word and TeX.
A TeX distribution, such as MiKTeX for Windows or MacTeX for MacOS, for typesetting your document.
Zotero, for managing citations.
Better BibTeX, a plugin that improves Zotero .

Getting Started

Fork this “repo”
Clone your forked copy of the repo (use the “GitHub: Clone” command in Atom, accessed via the Command Palette).

Understand the Repo

📁 sections/: a folder containing a bunch of Markdown files that make up the content of your essay.
- a-long-story.md: a Markdown file
- intro.md: a Markdown file
- section-one.md: a Markdown file
.gitignore: a list of files for Git to ignore. You can also ignore this file.
bibliography-preamble.tex: a short TeX file that sets the formatting for your bibliography.
bibliography.bib: a BibLaTeX-formatted database of all of the sources you will be citing. It is an exported version of this Zotero collection. For more, see below.
metadata.yml: a YAML file containing the metadata (author, title, margins) regarding the essay. See below.
process.ps1 and process.sh: PowerShell and shell scripts that convert your Markdown content into .docx and .pdf files.
README.md: this file.
sections.txt: a file containing a list of files from inside the sections folder above, in the order in which they should appear in the final document.
template.tex: the underlying TeX template for generating the pdf.

Generating Output

On MacOS and Linux, execute sh process.sh from within the repo root directory, which you can do in Atom by launching a terminal from within the editor.
On Windows, execute .\process.ps1 from within the repo root directory, which you can do in Atom by launching a terminal from within the editor.

These commands will create two “finished” files: output.docx and output.pdf. Additionally, for reference purposes, it will put a TeX file, output.tex in the tmp directory, which is created on the fly.

Writing Scholarly Markdown

The two main differences between writing regular Markdown and scholarly Markdown are the introduction of footnotes and citations.

Footnotes

Footnotes are written inline with the text itself. This is similar to the way applications like Scrivener treat footnotes. In other words, you write them like this:

It was important to remember that, during this battle, the sides were hardly
evenly matched.^[In fact, contemporary sources posit that one side had nearly
ten times as many soldiers.] Nevertheless, the battle started precisely at
noon.

Note the syntax: a ^, followed by the contents of the footnote enclosed in [].

If your footnotes need to grow to multiple paragraphs, please see the Pandoc documentation for “regular footnotes” (those described above are “inline footnotes”).

Citations

The .bib database, bibliography.bib, is written in the BibLaTeX. Every entry to the database begins with its type (@book, for example), followed by its citation key. In the case of the bibliography.bib included in this repo, the very first citation key is barnes_nightwood_1995.

When exporting a collection from Zotero as BibLaTeX (by right- or control-clicking on the collection and choosing “Export Collection…”), Zotero will auto-create citation keys of the format author_title_year.

Citing a work in the .bib file is done using the citation key. In Markdown, the typical format to do so is:

The narrator refers to Guideo Volkbein as “both a gourmet and a dandy, never
appearing in public without the ribbon of some quite unknown distinction
tinging his buttonhole with a faint thread”[@barnes_nightwood_1995 3].

The citation syntax is rather flexible and forgiving. The Pandoc documentation provides a few other examples:

Blah blah [see @doe99, pp. 33–35; also @smith04, chap. 1].

Blah blah [@doe99, pp. 33-35, 38-39 and *passim*].

Blah blah [@smith04; @doe99].

Long citation keys can be cumbersome and can be difficult to remember. Installing the Better BibTeX plugin for Zotero will let you define citation keys from within Zotero itself by adding a line bibtex: citation-key in the “Extras” field in Zotero. That is how, in the default bibliography.bib, the standard edition of Nightwood has a citation key of simply nightwood, not barnes_nightwood_1936.

Finally, often users will have one, giant .bib file that represents every citation they have saved. If this is the case for you, then, obviously, the bibliography key needs to be changed in metadata.yml to point to that file. However, in that case, you can also benefit from using the autocomplete-bibtex plugin for Atom that will auto-suggest citations for you.

Metadata.yml

The metadata.yml file contains information that is passed both to Pandoc itself and to LaTeX via the settings in template.tex.

title: This is the title of the essay or chapter.
author: This is an array of potential authors, with one listed. Each author can have three keys, of which the latter two can be blank:
- name: The author’s name
- affiliation: The author’s academic affiliation
- email: The author’s email
bibliography: This indicates to Pandoc where the BibLaTeX .bib database is.
notes-after-punctuation, csl, link-citations: These are specific values that Pandoc-citeproc handles. Please see the Pandoc-citeproc documentation for more information on these keys. The csl refers to a Citation Style Language file. By default, Pandoc-citeproc uses the chicago-author-date style. See below for more information on CSL.
nocite: If set to "@*", the entire contents of bibliography.bib will be printed in the bibliography, even if works remain uncited.
epigraph: This is an array of potential epigraphs, with two listed. Each epigraph should have two keys:
- text: The text of the epigraph
- source: The source of the epigraph pdf-options: This is a list of options for generating the pdf. They should be somewhat self-explanatory.
- font: This key, however, is a bit tricky, and it is commented out by default, because it is hard to predict what fonts are on someone’s computer. If you download and install EB Garamond, then you can uncomment the line as it is and have the pdf output typeset in EB Garamond.
- font-settings: This is a subgroup of font settings that may not apply to all fonts.

Citation Style Language Files

A brief list of CSL files to download. Once you download the file, you should drop it into the same folder as this repository and then set the csl key in metadata.yml to point to the file.

APA 6th ed: