WPS office and zotero plugin

WPS office

• I’ve been experimenting with linux recently quite a lot and I really am enjoying the setup that I have right now

• One of the things I didn’t think I actually would miss but I kind of do a bit is Microsoft Office

• The upside to linux however is that there are free programs that try to replace Microsoft Offices ridiculously priced Office program bundle

• This is great, however these free programs don’t quite cut the mustard

LibreOffice

• LibreOffice is okay, it has some of the features that Microsoft Office applications have but not all

• The UI is terrible though (especially if you’re someone like me who comes from Microsoft Office’s UI) the UI seems really outdated

• But Microsoft Offices UI also has quite a number of shortcomings and I found that I really hate the whole idea of ribbons and trying to find something really specific oftentimes leads to some googling (and now probably some chatGPT-ing)

But there is a trick to get the UI in LibreOffice to look better and more like Microsoft Offices

• LibreOffice also natively supports Zotero

• But over all there is just a massive lack of features in LibreOffice (I won’t list all of them but when creating a presentation recently I found a lot of missing things that made a presentation really difficult, and so I had to spin-up my Windows machine instead)

WPS office

• Then I came across a reddit thread in the Linux community that specifically discussed the available alternatives to Microsoft Office on Linux

• I found WPS office and was pleasantly surprised at the number of features that it really has

• But one thing that it doesn’t support is a zotero plugin

• I came across this thread with others like me that were disappointed by this: WPS Office integration with zotero

WPS Office plugin for zotero

• There appears to be a zotero plugin made on github

It was easy to install by following these steps

1. git clone https://github.com/tankwyn/WPS-Zotero.git
2. cd WPS-Zotero
3. ./install.py

… and that’s it

Straight out of the box the plugin works for WPS Office

Maybe time to write using latex?

• I have thought about this for a while

• I use neovim and do a lot of writing just using markdown files

• I think that I would really like to be able to move entirely away from relying on a word processor program but for things like making presentations I don’t see any other alternatives than either using online Microsoft Office, Google docs, LibreOffice or WPS Office

• In neovim I can create and automatically preview markdown files in a browser

• I can then use the zotero plugin to put references into the markdown file from zotero

• I can then convert this markdown file to a .pdf or .docx with a filter to render the references from the zotero plugin first, and then a second filter to render these references into apa style for example:

pandoc test.md -o test.pdf -F otref.py --citeproc --csl /mnt/g/apa.csl

• Then with some yaml header and some additional formatting specific to latex and/ or pandoc rendering inside the document itself its possible to get a document that looks pretty nice

• Pandoc additionally supports some html tags too for example:

<span style="font-variant:small-caps;">This will be in small caps!</span>

(Even quarto renders the html tags, but this makes sense since it is essentially a wrapper for pandoc that also executes and runs r and python code This will be in small caps!`)

Therefore, I think in the future I will be switching to using just a markdown editor like neovim will be beneficial in the long run. It makes sense that the idea of a word processor is to write words and not to be spend hours upon hours formatting and getting everything to look pretty.

Here’s a blog post I like that shows of vims power in latex using snippets