Zettlr is free and open source Markdown application designed for academic writing. It provides a lot of powerful tools to help you write academic texts right out of the box.
The application’s stated goal is simple: “Enabling researchers of arts and humanities, e.g. those people without any knowledge of coding, to finally free themselves from software that costs hundreds of dollars and pave the way into an Open Source era. This would be only fitting, given the fact that especially in political science and sociology, cries for Open Access journals are on the rise. So here’s what Zettlr is all about: It wants to be serious competition for word processors.”
See the Zettlr Documentation for the official documentation. Zettlr itself implements a mixture of different dialects. The editor itself highlights only GitHub Flavored Markdown plus some extra elements which extends Markdown syntax with Zettelkasten elements. You can also add LaTeX-commands.
Zettlr provides support for the following Markdown elements.
Element | Support | Notes |
---|---|---|
Headings | Yes | |
Paragraphs | Yes | |
Line Breaks | Yes | In addition to trailing whitespace, you can also use a trailing backslash or press the Return key once to achieve the same result. |
Bold | Yes | |
Italic | Yes | |
Blockquotes | Yes | |
Ordered Lists | Yes | |
Unordered Lists | Yes | |
Code | Yes | |
Horizontal Rules | Yes | |
Links | Yes | |
Images | Yes | |
Tables | Yes | |
Fenced Code Blocks | Yes | |
Syntax Highlighting | Yes | |
Footnotes | Yes | |
Heading IDs | Partial | |
Definition Lists | No | |
Strikethrough | Yes | |
Task Lists | Yes | |
Emoji (copy and paste) | Yes | |
Emoji (shortcodes) | No | |
Highlight | No | |
Subscript | No | |
Superscript | No | |
Automatic URL Linking | Yes | |
Disabling Automatic URL Linking | No | |
HTML | Unknown |