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Introducing app.JESociety.org

Posted by JESociety on

Apparatus

Apparatus is a focused writing environment for scholarly work — Markdown editing, a real bibliography, footnotes, tracked changes, and everything else a piece of academic writing actually needs, in one place. It runs entirely in your browser. No account, no subscription, nothing installed. Your document lives in your browser’s own local storage the moment you start typing, and stays there unless you choose to export it.

Getting started

Just type or paste plain text or Markdown into the editor. Turn on MD Preview (Markdown ▾) to see it rendered live, side by side.

The fastest way to find anything in Apparatus is Ctrl/Cmd+K — the Command Palette. Type what you want to do, and it searches every action in the app by name and by what it does. Most people end up using this far more than the menus.

What’s here

  • A real bibliography manager — track sources, fetch them by ISBN, detect citation details from pasted text, and cite in Chicago, APA, MLA, or SBL style. Type [@ plus a few letters mid-sentence to search and insert a citation without leaving the keyboard.
  • Footnotes and multiple footnote series, automatic renumbering, and one-click reformatting when a citation style needs to change.
  • Cross-references for figures, tables, and headings — label once, reference anywhere, and it becomes a live “Figure 3.”
  • Tracked changes and comments, built on plain-text CriticMarkup so the document stays readable text at every stage — exports as real Word tracked changes and comments.
  • Mindmap — your document’s own heading structure, drawn as a visual, collapsible, draggable tree.
  • A back-of-book index and a list of abbreviations, compiled from terms you mark as you write.
  • Search across every document you’ve ever opened or downloaded here, not just the one in front of you.
  • Snapshots, Clips, and Voice Memos for versioning, reusable text, and recorded notes — all local, all scoped to what you’re working on.
  • And much more . . .

Everything exports cleanly: .txt, .md, .docx (with real tracked changes and comments), LaTeX, standalone HTML, PDF via print, or OPML. Files from elsewhere — .docx, .tex, .html, .opml — open right back into Markdown, tracked changes and all.

Press ? at any time for the full list of what’s here and every keyboard shortcut.

Check out Apparatus at app.jesociety.org or www.jesociety.org/apps.