academic reasearch-oriented scripts and configurations for open source & free tools. The learning curve is steep and rewarding. One of the motivations is to save time int he production of consumable goods in an academic context. Syllabi, letters, handouts, essays, slideshow presentations, etc. Another is to collect tools that can help to streamline one's workflows. This collection seeks to list and review these tools for some common use cases relevant to academic research and prose writing.

This is being cobbled together using OSX Capitan 10.11.6 and it presupposes that you have the software listed below. This can probably work in macOS (10.12.x+) without too much trouble. This will probably also work in many a flavor of Linux. Whether this can work under Windows or other operating system is left up to you.

• xcode with commandline tools
• mactex
• homebrew
  • python2 and/or (preferably) python3
  • pandoc
  • pandoc-citeproc
  • gnu coreutils
  • par (paragraph reflow / reformatting of paragraphs from within vim or other programs/command line)
  • tree display directory structures
  • the silver searcher ( tool for searching for keywords in text files within directory structures, can be integrated with awk.vim vim plugin and used from within vim )
  • pdfgrep (tool for searching through pdf files for specific key words)
  • pdftk (tools for modifying pdf files)
  • ocrmypdf (tool set for doing optical character recognition on scanned PDF files)
  • unpaper (tool set for doing optical character recognition on scanned PDF files)
  • tesseract an open source OCR engine that should be included with one of the 2 above tool sets
  • vim and/or macvim
• vim plugins (Just about any text editor will do, just with a different workflow)
  • vim-pandoc
  • vim-pandoc-syntax
  • ack.vim
  • vim-obsession which will let you save vim session files to get back up to speed quickly when working with large projects.
• optional vim plugin
  • vim-airline
  • base16-vim
  • see base16 for more info and for integrating into your shell or other relevant programs
  • ultisnips
  • vim-snippets
  • vimcompletesme
  • vim-markdown
  • vim-markdownfootnotes