Plain Plain Text is a project dedicated to providing modular tutorials for humanists interested in using plain text in their scholarly communication. There are many benefits to moving to plain text, but we also know that it can be intimidating. Change typically is, and getting used to new software is famously tricky.

Instead, we take a modular approach to our evangelism and pedagogy. If you already have a text editor installed, you can skip that section. If you understand Git, skip… and so on. Similarly, because the various steps are modular, they can be reproduced throughout the site, keeping the information current and, hopefully, fresh for every semester’s new batch of graduate students who have had it with Microsoft Word.

Anyone can, of course, use these tutorials, but they are written with a student in the social sciences or humanities in mind. That means that they do not assume familiarity with the command line, or scripting, or anything like that. They assume that the user is comfortable moving files around and using a program like Word to write.

That said, because of the specific interests of scholars in these fields, the order in which we make tutorials will reflect those needs. For example, few people need to worry about keeping a print and online version of their CV current and handsome. On the other hand, every scholar has to brush up their CV every once in a while, as the document accompanies job applications, grant proposals, and many other aspects of academic life.

We are opinionated. What that means, in programming terms, is that we make many, many assumptions about how you “should” organize your projects and move through these tutorials. This includes what software you should use and what online services you should use. You are, of course, welcome to substitute your own solutions, but we only guarantee that our way works.

Similarly, we are committed to free and open software and we encourage inclusivity and accessibility in our pedagogy. Hence, all of the tutorials here use free software except for the operating system. Concretely, throughout these tutorials, you will be introduced to the ecosystem of Atom, Git, Pandoc, and TeX. These four tools will get you most everywhere you need to go, whether that’s writing a cover letter or ensuring the quality of your dissertation’s bibliography.

We are scholars from various disciplines who are convinced that there’s a better way to create scholarly materials, specifically writing. We both enjoy the wide flexibility offered by the software we use and its slight old-school aesthetic that foregrounds letters on a background, moving the focus of the scholar toward the content and, hopefully, away from the irritations and frippery of expensive word processing systems.

Specifically, this project was begun by Moacir P. de Sá Pereira (@muziejus on GitHub), who has occasionally written plain text tutorials and helped people get about that plain text life for two decades.