Tinderbox Forum

Just starting out, I'm an academic and want a workflow for Devonthink, Tinderbox and Paperpile

Q & A - getting started with Tinderbox
#1

Hi everyone!

I’m an academic that does epidemiology and also uses R (language) with R Studio to do plots, reports and of course academic writing. My academic writing is usually done with Rmarkdown, however, the new kid on the block is Quarto which I see as Rmarkdown on steroids.

My reference manager is Paperpile, I like the interface, how it saves everything to a Google Drive automatically and the extensions for all Chromium-based browsers. I also recently started to use DEVONthink to place all the PDFs I read and annotate.

So, I’m kind of looking for a workflow that can integrate all this things, there are two places I have been looking:

  1. Mastering Tinderbox by Michael Becker
  2. Academic Workflow by Beck Tench

Does anybody know another good resource focused on academic writing and research?

Thanks!

#2

Quarto (https://quarto.org) looks interesting. I’m currently thinking of using Tinderbox to generate files for an R Bookdown/Blogdown process with perhaps a web interactive version via R Shiny but all using the same base documents. Quarto seems to blend R with Python. Frustratingly it seem an online-only ‘app’ so a bit of a black-box, albeit interesting.

As to workflow, experience shows you might want to re-phrase your question slightly. Starting with someone else’s process normally ends up needing app app you don’t use/want, or a skill you don’t know/want to learn. For instance, do you annotate only in DEVONthink or do you do some in Paperpile?

Does PaperPile only work with google Chrome, or are other browsers supported?

What we can’t use/learn is worth feeding into the mix is it saves committing to an approach that them falls fouls of other personal boundaries.

#3

Hi, thanks for helping me out!

Yes, Quarto is fascinating, I think it is a fantastic tool if you work with R, and maybe even other editors.

I create my annotations with DEVONthink so that everything is in the same place, also I mainly read and annotate with my iPad with DEVONthink To Go.

PaperPile works with Chromium-based browsers (including Edge), but I know Safari support is coming next.

Presently I use DevonThink, PaperPile, (recently) Tinderbox, and maybe I might add Hazel to the mix to help me with the chore of moving the PDFs myself.

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