Rationale

PaperDragon is a tiny and free alternative to bloated office software. Create nice, double-spaced documents in minutes using any text editor, like Notepad. Working with plain text avoids the long list of delays and distractions offered by modern word processors. Text files can be created on almost any device, take up less room, and are easily searched and indexed.

Embedded jpg and png images with captions, font selection, bold and italics are now supported. The final paper has page numbers, running headline, and a reference section. Works well with Zotero for generating references.

Installation

To install PaperDragon on Windows, download the archive and double-click it. Copy the folder to Program Files and put pd.exe somewhere in your computer's path (like c:\).

Linux, Mac versions

PaperDragon was made for any operating system. It is written in Anchor, the standard C programming language we are all familiar with, but using a Python or Lua-like coding style. First, download and install Anchor and then run "make" to compile it for your particular operating system.

$ make $ sudo make install

Usage

Pd is a command-line program. It can be run in a terminal (Start Menu-->Run-->cmd). To create a paper from paper.txt:

pd paper.txt > paper.doc

How it works

Any line that ends in punctuation or a trailing space is considered to be a paragraph. Anything else is a heading. To get a feel for how it works, open up paper.txt with Notepad and notice the general format. Feel free to use paper.txt as a template for future papers.

Known Problems

Formatting will be messed up if you edit files created by PaperDragon. The reason is PaperDragon uses RTF format and most word processors don't implement RTF properly. Be sure to save the document as a specific document type (e.g. File...save as...Word 2000/97) if you do any editing.

PaperDragon and documentation are Copyright © 2010 Henry Kroll III. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".