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:

• Markdown and the future of collaborative academic writing
• Thoughts on a preprint server
• How to ditch Word

Features

1. Free as in free speech - promotes open science, pre-publication review, collaboration.

2. Free as in free beer - uses open-source, free software and released under CC-NC-BY 3.0.

3. Easy to learn - Markdown is not LaTex, for better and worse.

4. Integration with GitHub - free hosted version control, ideal for backup, versioning and collaboration.

5. Pandoc integration - multiple Markdown extensions, multiple output formats.

6. Real-time Markdown preview - WYSIWYM / WYSIWYG.

7. Display math with LaTeX formatting - $x^2+y^2=r^2$.

8. Citations - BibTeX: [@Drake1991]

9. 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)
   

10. Local host option with a limited number of dependencies - for offline editing on the train and in the airplane

11. Remote host option at http://markx.herokuapp.com/ - no installation required

12. 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

1. Clone this repository
2. Install Python - developed with version 2.7
3. Install Flask and requests: pip install Flask requests
4. Optional: Add an environment variable named BIB_FILE with the path to your BibTeX .bib file, or create config.py file with the key-value BIB_FILE = "/path/to/bib/file" or replace the file library.bib with your own .bib file. Note that the path should be absolute and should not start with a ~.
5. Run Markx by calling python server.py and pointing your browser at http://localhost:5000.

More help can be found in the help file.

License