The RASH JavaScript Editor (RAJE): A Wordprocessor for Writing Web-first Scholarly Articles

Abstract

The most used format for submitting and publishing papers in the academic domain is the Portable Document Format (PDF), since its possibility of being rendered in the same way independently from the device used for visualising it. However, the PDF format has some important issues as well, among which the lack of interactivity and the low degree of accessibility. In order to address these issues, recently some journals, conferences, and workshops have started to accept also HTML as Web-first submission/publication format. However, most of the people are not able to produce a well-formed HTML5 article from scratch, and they would, thus, need an appropriate interface, e.g. a word processor, for creating such HTML-compliant scholarly article. To provide a solution to the aforementioned issue, in this paper we introduce the RASH JavaScript Editor (a.k.a. RAJE), which is a multi platform word processor for writing scholarly articles in HTML natively. RAJE allows authors to write research papers by means of a user-friendly interface hiding the complexities of HTML5. We also discuss the outcomes of a user study where we asked some researchers to write a scientific paper using RAJE.