Show HN: MonsterWriter – Write a thesis, post, or organize notes | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: MonsterWriter – Write a thesis, post, or organize notes

94 pointsWolfOliver30 comments

Hello HN,

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!

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For scientific writing, you've also got https://manubot.org/ which combines git (for versioning and collaboration) and markdown and multiple good-looking outputs

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Edit 2: "We will use our servers to create PDF files" is a no-go for certain documents - unpublished papers are often regarded as quite sensitive

I think there is a market for users who don't wanna bother with a "set of tools" as Manubot describes itself on the website.

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.

It is the same problem with a pandoc-based workflow. You just end up yak-shaving and spending more time tuning the toolchain than with your writing work.

I would guess that Overleaf [0] would be a bigger competitor, they even have a simplified version (no version control or collaboration) that is open source (aGPLv3) and self-hostable [1].

[0]: https://www.overleaf.com/ [1]: https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf?tab=readme-ov-file

So you're telling me it can't validate the license without internet connection. Which means you lose the access to the software you paid for if the authentication servers are dead.

Great times.

Just about to start writing my PhD thesis but... alas, no Linux love :(.

I used emacs orgmode (orgmode ->latex-> pdf)for mine and stand by it. Its mature and pretty awesome.

I'm playing with this a little bit.

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.

You can insert narrative-citations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vR8i-EY_UBk&t=220s

Ah, ok, cool. Pity it can't be hand-edited, but that should generally cover it.

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...

This is nice! My thesis writing experience always was far from comfortable, used Obsidian, Evernote, and Latex tools, but nothing matched my needs fully. MonsterWriter would definitely help me few years back.

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

This is interesting. Reminds me of Kinopio, which I kinda liked but looked too casual and not serious (in my own point-of-view).

https://kinopio.club/

Looks interesting. Cross-references within the same doc are surprisingly rare in Markdown editors. However, there is no import function for existing Markdown (or any other file format)? That makes it pretty hard to try this out in a serious way.

For now, it is only copy&paste

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.

Stream of thought feedback – nice idea, but feels clumsy:

- 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.

Thanks for your feedback. You can find the x-references when you insert a citation, there is an extra tab for this

This is the first I heard of it! I love the idea, I keep looking for an easy-to-use editor for technical reports. I've been using Typora for now, but chapter management would be nice.

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.

Does it integrate well with spell checking and grammar checking?

Given that its multilingual (as I am) I prefer Microsoft Editor, but Grammarly is good since I mostly write in English.

I use it with Grammarly Desktop

So how can I actually fill in the title page info for an APA student paper (e.g. department). Also, author and other "export" info doesn't seem to be saved. APA by default supports in-flow tables, which is not legal in APA. So many basic formatting issues with APA.

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.

nice. Im trying it out. I'm not that bothered personally about integrations (a DOI is really easy to copy and paste from one tool to another). But I'll get in there first.. I switched to Paperpile a while ago (after the death of Citeulike RIP) - and it's pretty darn perfect. I'd vote a +1 to have that as a citation source..

PS is this a electron app? It has that feel..

Hi thank you for the feedback, we'll check out Paperpile and what possibilities it provides.

For now you could check if Paperpile supports BibLaTeX export and just import the references using BibLaTeX.

If you inspect the app contents like on your FS, right click the app and press show contents on the app you can tell if its an electron app usually if it has .asar files

This is nice, and as a simple way to write and keep cross-references without having to commit to Word or LaTeX (journals often require one or the other, and often Word in my field unfortunately). The thing that would keep me from using this regularly is mostly issues of UI/UX polish, and of course no Linux version.

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.

Is there an app that can beautify a Jupiter notebook and export it as PDF or single webpage?

The built-in nbconvert tool can already do that. Maybe not the most beautiful output by default, but you can give it custom CSS or latex template (for PDF output) via CLI flags.

Quarto can do this really well (eg, my blog here: https://andreasthinks.me/posts/burglary_attendance/). It also does Rmarkdown.

This project comes three months too late for me sadly... I'll still check it out though

Hi there,

Can we use this app on multiple devices and sync documents?

The first version of a sync will be the browser (SaaS) version. You can sign up for the waiting list: https://getwaitlist.com/waitlist/5547

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