Zettlr — The Complete Guide: A Markdown Editor for Theses, Papers and Long Reports
Zettlr is a Markdown writing environment that covers the whole path from notes to a finished document. It particularly suits engineering students writing a thesis or a paper, and engineers writing long reports with references to sources.
Zettlr
Zettlr project
A Markdown editor for technical writing and theses — Zotero citations, LaTeX equations and export via Pandoc.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Citations — connects to Zotero and JabRef, with thousands of citation styles.
- LaTeX equations — rendered inside the editor.
- Mermaid charts — flowcharts written directly in the text.
- Export — to Word, PDF and other formats through Pandoc profiles.
- Local files — plain text on your computer, no mandatory cloud and no telemetry.
Who it suits
Anyone who wants to focus on content rather than formatting, and prefers the text to stay in open files that can be backed up and kept in Git. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux under the GPL-3.0 licence.
Related tools
For managing references — Zotero. For professional typesetting — LyX or Typst.
Zotero
Corporation for Digital Scholarship
Reference and bibliography manager — save papers and standards, annotate PDFs and cite automatically in Word.
Get it from the vendor
JabRef
JabRef community
BibTeX and BibLaTeX reference manager — papers, standards and theses, working with LaTeX and LyX.
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LyX
LyX team
A graphical LaTeX-based document editor — theses, papers and technical reports with equations.
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Typst
Typst
Modern typesetting for technical reports and equations — simpler syntax than LaTeX and instant compiling.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
Zettlr makes academic and technical writing simple: write in plain text, cite with a click and export to the required format at the end.