in 2017 I started a project that would become MonsterWriter. First envisioned as a semi-structured wiki it became a writing application specialized for scientific content. It is a perfect tool if you write your thesis. While it is focused on technical content, you can still see the knowledge management spirit in it.
One or two years ago, my wife joined me in my efforts and redesigned the whole project and we recently released it as MonsterWriter2.
To celebrate this milestone we are giving away free lifetime licenses for the Desktop version (till Apr 28). Just use the promo code "gu0ho4q" for a 100% discount. You can find detailed instructions here:
https://www.monsterwriter.app/promotion.html
You can also find a short introduction video to the app on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vR8i-EY_UBk
We are happy to receive any kind of feedback!
One of the most useful features is that you can just insert a doi/pubmedid/... and it will automatically fetch and format the references
Edit: One of the biggest problems with the tools for scientific writing is that the writing process if often a collaboration - one author makes a draft, distributes it, and receives comments and revisions. Currently - and sadly - I think Microsoft Word has the best solutions for commenting and revising text, although you have to keep track of multiple versions being emailed around
Edit 2: "We will use our servers to create PDF files" is a no-go for certain documents - unpublished papers are often regarded as quite sensitive
[0]: https://www.overleaf.com/ [1]: https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf?tab=readme-ov-file
While MonsterWriter uses LaTeX in the background, you do not see it. You only get the resulting pdf. Also, while it is possible to integrate with Zotero, you don't have to, you can just insert the DOI/ISNB/... into MonsterWriter and it will fetch the info as well.
Great times.
Can this deal with varied styles of inline citations within a single text? For example, APA lets you say both "This study found X (Shmoe, 2021)" as well as "Shmoe (2021) found X." There are other ways you might vary it as well. For instance, you might say "Shmoe (2021) found X (p.191)."
This kind of variation is used all the time in papers, but I don't see how I could do that in Monster.
I feel like it would be nice to be able to insert a citation and then tell it how to format that. You should be able to type in in yourself. For instance, I don't expect Monster to have a dropdown for "Shmoe and colleagues (2021) found X," but I should be able to hit "insert a citation," connect it to the article, and then hand-type "Shmoe and colleagues (2021)" so that the whole thing is associated with the reference.
Another random thought after playing with this for a few minutes: It should be easier to just drag in an image, without needing to go to insert-image and then drag in the image.
A couple little bug reports on citations (let me know if you want this elsewhere, I don't have to clutter this thread):
- APA doesn't include a second period between an author's initial and the date, but you have that in the bibliography. E.g. Schmoe, J.. (2021).
- Many places list DOIs as urls, e.g. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203108352, but MonsterWriter tries to import that as a webpage, so I have to remove the part before the number
- I added the following citation by DOI: 10.1080/10508406.2013.836655. In the metadata in the citation popup, it correctly lists the lead author's name as "Berland, Matthew," but it comes out in both the citation and the bibliography as "Berl, ."
- I wasn't sure if there was a way to add a citation where an author had written a specific chapter of an edited book. [1]. I could create a reference to a book, and then I could list a chapter, but the inline citation was weird (Shmoe, 2013, chaps Chapter Name) instead of just (Shmoe, 2013), and the bibliography section didn't include the chapter name. Basically it just treated it like a page number, instead of as an authored section of an edited book.
- Speaking of which, every time I went to edit that reference the drop down switched back to "page number" instead of "chapter."
1. https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references...
But I have noticed that my problem is mainly in visualizing and remembering all the docs, pdfs, websites, and basically keeping all the bits of informational from various sources.
So I started my own hobby project LimanDoc[1] where it would serve the purpose of visualizing, diagramming, and previewing docs (later I'll add features like in Roam/Loqseq to backlink pieces of information). One important feature is keeping the files agnostic and possibility to open files in other 3rd party tools. If I want to edit word/excel/markdown files I do it in other tools, and in LimanDoc just preview it.
Still far from perfect, but it is available for download and play around.
[1] limandoc.com
https://kinopio.club/
To have some content, open any website and press cmd+a, just past it into the editor. depending on the size it might take a little but the editor tries to clean up your pasted content and inserts it.
- Same doc references to sections or tables, how are they supposed to work? Can't get it to work.
- I hover over the "element selector" way too often by accident when just wanting to access "settings".
- I wish there was a sidebar that shows all available elements. The popup is kinda annoying. The popup also doesn't indicate that it is scrollable.
- Linkify-feature opening a modal is annoying and breaks the flow, should be a hovering tooltip.
- Coming from a Markdown editor, I kinda fight the section-concept constantly. For example, tab creates a new section, whereas I expect a code block.
- Electron-app feeling, less optimized than VSCode.
- How do I create a second document?
Just my two cents, but currently, it wouldn't fit for my use case.
I was able to try it out on my personal computer and love this. I would like to transition to my work computer, but I can't because the PDF export goes to your servers. I understand why, but for someone technical, it's not hard to setup LaTeX. If you ever do a local-only version, I will buy a copy for my work computer.
Given that its multilingual (as I am) I prefer Microsoft Editor, but Grammarly is good since I mostly write in English.
Essayist remains the best option, though it painfully lacks table support. Monster looks like it could be useful in maybe a year or so of development.
PS is this a electron app? It has that feel..
For now you could check if Paperpile supports BibLaTeX export and just import the references using BibLaTeX.
Examples:
- On Windows right now and the scrollbars pop out as white even when disabled (nothing to scroll), so I can't stand to use dark mode, but also hate light mode in general.
- The menu bar is my normal Windows UI font size, and the UI in the app otherwise is much bigger. The mismatch bugs me excessively.
- Relatedly, I need to be able to set fonts and sizes. Forcing me into one that doesn't have glyphs I need, and then forcing a fallback that's mismatched, it's a problem. Forcing me to use Poppins as the only font alone is reason enough that I won't be able to use it.
Which is really a shame because I would start using this tomorrow as my main writing tool for solo papers. It checks the boxes I otherwise need and would let me focus on writing not on packages or templates or other things that are just a waste of time, since again at any point I may need to run it through pandoc anyway if I change my mind on which journal to submit to.
Also local-only would be needed, but I guess the server is an easy enough way to implement a paywall? I just don't feel comfortable sending potentially sensitive data to some unknown server.
That said, honestly just giving me access to something like the stylesheet for basics would be a huge help, and again that alone would have me using this tomorrow. Otherwise I'll stick to Google Docs or Overleaf.
Well done, overall, though.
Can we use this app on multiple devices and sync documents?