Various types of documents

Office

  • LibreOffice: A free and powerful office suite, and a successor to OpenOffice.
  • Office 365: Students and educators at eligible institutions can sign up for Office 365 Education for free, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and now Microsoft Teams, plus additional classroom tools.

Markdown

  • Markdown guide: A free and open-source reference guide that explains how to use Markdown, the simple and easy-to-use markup language you can use to format virtually any document.
  • Marktext: A simple and elegant markdown editor, available for Linux, macOS and Windows.

LaTeX

  • LaTeX: A high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents.
  • Overleaf : An easy to use, online, collaborative LaTeX editor.

Typst

  • Typst: A new markup-based typesetting system that is powerful and easy to learn, born out of frustration with LaTeX.

Slides

  • Marp: Create beautiful slide decks using an intuitive Markdown experience.
  • Beamer: A LaTeX document class for creating presentation slides, with a wide range of templates and a set of features for making slideshow effects.

Conversion

  • Pandoc: If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife.

Handwriting

  • Google Jamboard: A digital interactive whiteboard that can be used for collaboration
  • Xournal++: An open source tool for annotating PDF files. It supports pen, mouse, and keyboard input.

Translation and spelling

  • DeepL : A neural machine translation service first developed within Linguee
  • Grammarly: A cloud-based typing assistant. It reviews spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement, and delivery mistakes in English texts, detects plagiarism, and suggests replacements for the identified errors.
  • LanguageTool: A multilingual spelling, style, and grammar checker that helps correct or paraphrase texts
  • Spell-checker: Free Online Spell Checker with URL input.
  • Antidote: Writing assistance software for English and French.

General tips

Style

  • Academic phrasebank : Bank of expressions to improve scientific writing
  • Thesaurus : Extend your vocabulary with synonyms and antonyms
  • ACRONYM: Acronym CReatiON for You and Me

Graphics

  • diagrams.net: Free online diagram software.
  • TikZit: A GUI editor for graphs and string diagrams whose files can be included directly in papers typeset using LaTeX.
  • Inkscape: Professional software for creating vector imagery.
  • Canva: A graphic design platform that is used to create social media graphics and presentations, and includes readymade templates.

Icons

  • BioIcons: A library of free open source icons for science illustrations in biology and chemistry (mostly).
  • BioRender: Thousands of pre-made icons and templates from more than 30 fields of life sciences.
  • PhyloPic: Free silhouette images of animals, plants, and other life forms.

Data visualization

  • Data to Viz: Leads you to the most appropriate graph for your data. It links to the code to build it and lists common caveats you should avoid.
  • DataVizProject: A website trying to present all relevant data visualizations, so you can find the right visualization and get inspired how to make them.