Hi. Checking in for a student who needs to write scholarly articles using the APA style. He's new to the Mac but has used an iPad for years. I'm quite used to using Pages to create documents, but I must admit, that for uncomplicated docs, I use Text Edit. Since I haven't written anything scholarly for quite some time, I'm wondering what opinions others might have regarding the most user-friendly word processor for writing scholarly articles. I imagine this is quite subjective, but I'd love to hear your perspectives on using the various word processors on Mac for more scholarly pursuits. thanks so much.
Chris
Comments
Consider Markdown or LaTeX
I would suggest using your preferred text editor, whatever that is, with LaTeX or Markdown to write the paper. Use BibTeX for the citations, which many online bibliographical resources (e.g., Google Scholar) will export.
For Markdown, Pandoc is an excellent tool. For LaTeX, install MacTeX. The TeXShop editor included in MacTeX is quite accessible, but you can use any editor capable of saving plain text files.
There are abundant resources on the Web for learning Markdown and/or LaTeX.
Also, Quarto has been gaining attention recently. It's based on Markdown and Pandoc, but it offers a variety of extensions. If you have HomeBrew installed on the Mac, then "brew install quarto" is all you need. Documentation is available online.