TextMethod Academic

Inspired by a contempt for word processor bloatware and a belief that adherence to the WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) principle improves the writing process, TextMethod Academic is a set of document composition and typesetting tools especially for for scholars in the social sciences and humanities. Written in Python, it relies on reStructuredText for providing a clean, lightweight markup syntax for composition with any plain text editor, LaTeX for professional typesetting and attractive final document generation, and BibTeX for easy management of bibliographic references.

The vision for TextMethod Academic is to provide a Web service that allows a user to upload a properly formatted document and a BibTeX database (if citations are to be included), and receive an attractively formatted PDF and a structurally sound, standards-compliant XHTML version of the document. The software will also be provided as an Open Source Python library, and a command-line tool for users who wish to run it themselves.

Current projects (some related, others not)

The code for all projects is stored in a Darcs repository, browsable via its Trac instance, and accessible to Darcs via http://fs.textmethod.com/repos/PROJECT_NAME