Setting up Atom as a `math-markdown` Note-Taking app

atom-math-md.md

Setting up Atom as a math-markdown Note-Taking app

The goal is to tweak Atom to be the perfect note-taking editor in a math-heavy research environment.

• Write in Markdown
• With math support - Including global macros
• And citation/bibliography support - taken from a bib file, e.g. managed by JabRef

Setup

• Install Pandoc.

• For an isolated markdown-only installation, set up Atom as a portable app. Follow the instruction to install Atom as a portable app.

• Add the markdown-preview-plus package

  Replacement for the core markdown-preview package - disable it.

  In the settings:

  • Enable Math conversion by default (can be triggered by ctrl+shift+x)
  • Set the Renderer Backend to Pandoc
  • Enable Citations (via pandoc-citeproc)
  • Set the absolute path of your refs.bib to the Fallback Bibliography (bibfile) (bibfiles put in the same folder as the .md file will be used if they match names set in the Bibliography field)
  • Disable Remove References (Can be fine-tuned per document by setting suppress-bibliography: false in the YAML frontmatter)
  • To enable links to referrences, set a link-citations: true in the YAML frontmatter.
  • Setting global LaTeX macros can be done in .atom/markdown-preview-plus.cson using a MathJax-like syntax

• Other packages

  • Easier citations - autocomplete-bibtex

    add your refs.bib file to the bibtex entry in the package's settings.

  • Pandoc's Flavored Markdown Syntax Highligthing - language-pfm

    Replacement for the core language-gfm package - disable it.

  • Markdown Toolkit markdown-writer, tool-bar-markdown-writer

  • Navigation - minimap, highlight-selected, minimap-highlight-selected