PanWriter

If you've ever needed to convert one raw text document to another, you'll know just how arduous the process can be. There are so many different formats (and formats within formats), and they conspire with the subtleties of language to make the task almost impossible. Even programmers who can easily manage binary file conversion struggle with text formats. However, there is one text-processing tool to rule them all, and that's Pandoc. Running from the command line, pandoc will let you convert one text input stream to an output stream. It knows about the different versions of HTML, Markdown, DOCX, and LaTeX, and it can take much of the pain away. This is why PanWriter is potentially such an interesting text editor, because the "pan" element in its name refers to Pandoc.

PanWriter uses Pandoc to import and export from its native Markdown. This ensures that you can get as close to a format's canonical version when exporting and work with as many different formats as possible. As with similar Markdown editors, you can split the view vertically to show your writer's rendered output on the right of the main window. This is useful if you know your words are going to be presented in this way as it gives you a great impression of the amount of space your words will use. But what's also unique in PanWriter is that this preview is rendered via CSS, which you can then edit in-file by adding the CSS to your Markdown document. The results of your tinkering are shown immediately in the preview, making this ideal for writers working with static sites that take Markdown as an input.

Project Website

https://github.com/mb21/panwriter

Thanks to the Electron platform, we imagine adding an in-line CSS preview to a Markdown editor is relatively easy.

Planetarium

KStars 3.1

The KStars application has long been a stalwart of the KDE educational packages. And like the stars themselves, changes to KStars take an epoch to become visible to the human eye, which means we must have switched epochs. In the last few months, there have been two huge updates to this venerable planetarium. The first came at the end of 2018 with the release of KStars 3.0, with version 3.1 coming a few months later. The major update for these releases is the planet viewer, which borrows its code from the XPlanet solar system viewer. This adds a new settings page to the main KStars application, and you visit this first to trigger the download of more detailed XPlanet image maps. With that done, you can now pan and zoom around the surface of planets, like Mars, which really helps to break through the 2D barrier where KStars sometimes traps you, unlike Celestia, which is a pure 3D planetarium.

Another new feature that also helps you break through the false ceiling is the FITS viewer GUI. FITS is an astronomical image format, where astronomical doesn't just mean "from space" but also size and resolution. They can be generated or downloaded from locations such as the European Space Agency. With a decently optimized viewer that offers histograms, exporting a FITS image can be akin to going outside and looking through a powerful computer-controlled telescope. If you do go outside, the latest release adds all kinds of features for previewing images on DSLR cameras and controlling remote telescopes. And vitally, lots of this has been documented, so you don't have to go guessing or searching through the menus and settings pages. You can now just read the excellently updated manual.

Project Website

https://edu.kde.org/kstars/

Explore the universe and images from Hubble with a desktop planetarium.