scimax VS org-ref

Scimax should have out of box setup for bibliography, references etc. Anyway, regardless of what you use Emacs for, one step a time, would be my recommendation. Just start using it and solve problems as you experience them. It is better to add a single thing at a time when you need it, than to add 1000 different things because you think you will need them, and then not know what you have or what causes a problem.

https://github.com/wdavew/org-excalidraw is close. I discovered you can install Excalidraw from Chrome, and then it is like a local program. That is pretty amazing in itself. org-excalidraw indeed offers an org-link and way to make an excalidraw file from emacs, edited natively in an external excalidraw window. The svg preview does not work though if you use freehand lines in your image, and I was unable to install the npm packages on my Mac for some uninteresting reason related to DNS, but it did work in a node docker image. I find writing in excalidraw less advanced than in tools like Notability or PDFExpert. There are some artifacts in excalidraw from smoothing, or dangling pixels that I don't love. I forgot I had previously used https://github.com/lepisma/org-krita. Krita is a full drawing program, and this integrates into org-mode with image previews nicely. I am not that skilled in using it, and as a full drawing program, it has a learning curve. I wrote https://github.com/jkitchin/scimax/blob/master/scimax-inkscape.el to integrate inkscape into org-mode. It works, but I find inkscape slow to open, and I am not that skilled in using it.

Maybe give scimax a go?

Anyway, if you want something geared toward scientific usage, there is Scimax by J. Kitchin. There may be some others, but I am not aware off.

Apart from the ones already mention, John Kitchin's science-focused Scimacs is also an option.

I love org mode for scientific writing (especially with org-ref [0]) but it’s just not very convenient for collaborative projects because there are very few emacs users (in my field at least). Overleaf has been workable in my experience, but I still get pushback sometimes.

A diff-aware org-latex import would be amazing for this actually, like if pandoc could do tex -> org but align all the code blocks / generated figures

[0]: https://github.com/jkitchin/org-ref

Hi All, I'm a long time user of the org-ref package for writing academic documents in org and exporting to PDF via LaTeX.

Do you have experience with org-ref? If so, would you be able to help me out and tell me why you prefer Citar? It looks very interesting.

doi-utils, part of org-ref, has functions to add bib entries from DOIs.

Sorry, I'm not using org-ref myself yet. However, I think it pretty much addresses your use-case.