Markx is a Markdown editor for scientific writing.

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. We decided to build Markx as a make markdown writing a collaborative effort that could be hosted as web service. For additional discussion, see these blog posts:

• How to ditch Word
• Thoughts on a preprint server

It imitates the Pandoc flavor of Markdown to facilitate conversion to multiple formats and to enjoy the numerous Markdown extensions in Pandoc.

It runs in your browser with a limited number of requirements.

It is free (beer and speech).

Markx is currently in development but the master branch is working localy and can be used on machines with Python. We would love to get feedback from anyone using it.

1. Zenware

2. Realtime preview

3. Display math - $x^2+y^2=r^2$

4. Imitating the Markdown flavor of Pandoc

5. Citations using Pandoc+BibTeX: [@Drake1991]

6. 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)
   

1. Export to multiple format
2. Integration with git

• Server side (this is what you need to install if you run it on localhost):
  • Python with Flask
• 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

1. Clone this repo
2. Install Python and Flask (pip install Flask)
3. 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.
4. Run the editor locally by calling python server.py and opening your browser at http://localhost:5000.

• --toc option
• Interface to git
• Help/About page
• Interface to Mendeley?
• Python/R interfcace (knitr/Rmd/ipython notebook)?
• Replace Python/Flask with node.js?
• Put more stuff on TODO list