diillson/chatcli/paper-writing

Paper / Document Writing

Local, keyless typesetting with Pandoc (+ LaTeX for PDF). Detect: command -v pandoc pdflatex xelatex 2>/dev/null. Install: brew install pandoc basictex / apt install pandoc texlive-xetex / choco install pandoc miktex.

Author in Markdown

Write the document as markdown with a YAML metadata block:

---
title: A Study of X
author: Jane Doe
date: 2026-06-03
bibliography: refs.bib
---
# Introduction
As shown by prior work [@smith2024] ...

Convert

pandoc paper.md -o paper.pdf --pdf-engine=xelatex     # PDF (needs LaTeX)
pandoc paper.md -o paper.docx                          # Word
pandoc paper.md -o paper.tex                           # LaTeX source
pandoc report.docx -o report.md                        # reverse: docx → markdown

Citations

• Keep references in refs.bib (BibTeX). Cite with [@key].
• Render with --citeproc and a style: pandoc paper.md --citeproc --csl=ieee.csl -o paper.pdf.
• Fetch BibTeX for a DOI/arXiv id via @webfetch (e.g. https://doi.org/<doi> with

Accept: application/x-bibtex), then append to refs.bib.

Workflow

1. Draft structure (sections), then prose.
2. Insert citations as you go; collect them in refs.bib.
3. Render to the requested format; if LaTeX errors, read the log and fix the offending markup.

Rules

• For PDF you need a LaTeX engine — if absent, offer DOCX/HTML instead of failing.
• Report the output path; for papers, do a final pass for figure/table/citation references.