Best word processor for academic writing?

Hertz32

I saw a recommendation on here many moons ago for a word processor other than libreoffice or MS Word and I can't for the life of me remember what it was. It had the ability to rearrange chunks of the text at a time and sub group them by headings. 
I've never written an academic document before so if it could make chicago referencing an absolute piece of piss to do as well Id be exceptionally grateful, having never referenced before. 

Hertz32

I think it was scrivener, anybody confirm that it's a solid bit of kit? 

PolarityMan

Most academic papers will use latex but I wouldn't write directly into it. I would use word or libre office the copy / paste into a text editor prior to running ot through the latex tool chain.

djspecialist

Pandoc is worth looking at.

It allows you to convert from a wide range of input formats to a large range of output formats.  For example, you can write in Markdown (easy to edit, lightweight markup language) and then render to PDF via a LaTeX template (so you can get pro-quality typesetting).

Note that Pandoc is just the converter - you still need an editor.  I've found Atom to be very nice - and it includes a Markdown preview engine so you can have an (almost) WYSIWYG authoring experience.

Fretwired

Hertz32 said:

I think it was scrivener, anybody confirm that it's a solid bit of kit? 

It was developed as a Mac application. The Windows version is not (last time I checked) as fully featured and is buggy. If you work on a Mac then its worth a try.

Headphones

Everything I've published I've used Word for and the publisher/professional body dealt with any code changes at their end.

I suggest that the key is to follow the particular journal's style guidance, more than worrying about the software you use.

Although, of course, most prefoessional/academic bodies forgive an awful lot for good content that's easy to peer review.

Grunfeld

Hertz32 said:

I saw a recommendation on here many moons ago for a word processor other than libreoffice or MS Word and I can't for the life of me remember what it was. It had the ability to rearrange chunks of the text at a time and sub group them by headings. 
I've never written an academic document before so if it could make chicago referencing an absolute piece of piss to do as well Id be exceptionally grateful, having never referenced before. 

Yes it was Scrivener.
It costs but not much -- it's cheap.  Free trial to get used to it because while it shares similarities with Word it is not Word, or LibreOffice.  So you've got to start using it to see what's different about it and how that would work for you. 
Work through the examples they give you just to get the flavour of it.
I couldn't imagine using anything else for serious writing.
For me the huge, huge plus point is the way you can organise your project within it.  And a dozen other things too.

EDIT -- just to be clear, once you have finished your project, paper, thesis, novel, stage play, whatever, you usually then export that to something like LibreOffice or Word literally as the last thing you do.  Scrivener is for making the writing of the damn thing easier.

EDIT 2 -- @Fretwired ;; Scrivener for Windows has been as solid as a rock for the last couple of years.  @Hertz32 stability was hugely important for me when I switched to it.  No problems whatsoever.  In fact you have many back up options.  Mine are to save my writing projects to Dropbox every few amendments -- happens behind the scenes automatically and unobtrusively --  and to make a zip backup in a local folder on exit.  The program itself hasn't shown me any bugs -- just a fucking quirk which has now been sorted in a more recent version!  And I've used it on two substantial pieces of academic work (over 80k words for one; 15,000 words for the other); one 60k piece of non-academic work, and countless smaller pieces.  I've never lost a word.

Fretwired

Grunfeld said:

Hertz32 said:

I saw a recommendation on here many moons ago for a word processor other than libreoffice or MS Word and I can't for the life of me remember what it was. It had the ability to rearrange chunks of the text at a time and sub group them by headings. 
I've never written an academic document before so if it could make chicago referencing an absolute piece of piss to do as well Id be exceptionally grateful, having never referenced before. 

Yes it was Scrivener.
It costs but not much -- it's cheap.  Free trial to get used to it because while it shares similarities with Word it is not Word, or LibreOffice.  So you've got to start using it to see what's different about it and how that would work for you. 
Work through the examples they give you just to get the flavour of it.
I couldn't imagine using anything else for serious writing.
For me the huge, huge plus point is the way you can organise your project within it.  And a dozen other things too.

EDIT -- just to be clear, once you have finished your project, paper, thesis, novel, stage play, whatever, you usually then export that to something like LibreOffice or Word literally as the last thing you do.  Scrivener is for making the writing of the damn thing easier.

EDIT 2 -- @Fretwired ;;; Scrivener for Windows has been as solid as a rock for the last couple of years.  @Hertz32 stability was hugely important for me when I switched to it.  No problems whatsoever.  In fact you have many back up options.  Mine are to save my writing projects to Dropbox every few amendments -- happens behind the scenes automatically and unobtrusively --  and to make a zip backup in a local folder on exit.  The program itself hasn't shown me any bugs -- just a fucking quirk which has now been sorted in a more recent version!  And I've used it on two substantial pieces of academic work (over 80k words for one; 15,000 words for the other); one 60k piece of non-academic work, and countless smaller pieces.  I've never lost a word.

@Grunfeld .. that's good to hear. I'll check it out again. It's been a while since I looked at it but when I did the authors, in fairness, said it didn't have the same features as the native Mac version and was still effectively beta .. I had a look and they still have a phrase to that effect on their website.