I’ve always been fascinated with the tools people use to write (I should write a follow-up to that post), and over the last couple of years that interest has been focused on what I think of as .
Your one-stop publication workbench.
From idea to publication in one app: Zettlr accompanies you while writing your blog post, newspaper article, term paper, thesis, or entire book.
Every so often I check in on Zettlr to see if it can replace Obsidian as my primary writing platform. Comparing it feature for feature I’m pretty sure it can but to be honest, I prefer the Obsidian UI to Zettlr. Having said that, Zettlr is a great app and I wanted to share it here as an example of an amazing open-source project supporting scholarship.
Zettlr is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). This means: Your notes stay where you put them. No forced cloud synchronization, no hidden costs, and no strings attached. Additionally, Zettlr fully respects your privacy: No telemetry, no A/B testing, or any experiments. The only time Zettlr connects to the internet is to check for updates.
I love that Zettlr is built from the ground up with an academic audience in mind. This means that reference manager integration is built-in, as is Pandoc support for document formatting. And there are loads of other features relevant for academics, but one that really stands out is the integrated journal submission workflow:
One workflow that many users of Zettlr will need is to prepare and submit an article using a LaTeX template provided by a conference or journal. In this guide, we will show you how to add any LaTeX template to Zettlr so that you can write your paper in Markdown and export it to a camera-ready PDF file that you can then submit according to the journal’s or conference’s requirements.
And I love that they highlight this on their home page: Publish, not perish (which I’ve mentioned before).
If you’re stuck in the rut of using Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or pretty much any other writing app, check out Zettlr as an alternative.