Purplelink blogNotes from a one-person studio making tools for academic researchers.https://purplelink.llc/blog/2026-09-30T12:00:00ZBenjamin AmpelThe co-author who writes in Wordhttps://purplelink.llc/blog/the-co-author-who-writes-in-word/2026-09-30T12:00:00Z2026-09-30T12:00:00ZConverting cleanly between LaTeX and Word is the easy half of a coauthored manuscript. The harder half is getting a reviewed Word file's tracked changes and comments back into your LaTeX source without retyping them.Where Your Academic Record Actually Liveshttps://purplelink.llc/blog/where-your-academic-record-actually-lives/2026-09-23T12:00:00Z2026-09-23T12:00:00ZAcademics maintain their professional history in a dozen scattered places. When tenure reviews, grant applications, and annual reviews arrive, reconstructing the record from scratch is the problem.My travel photographs, now available as printshttps://purplelink.llc/blog/travel-photographs-as-prints/2026-09-23T12:00:00Z2026-09-23T12:00:00ZAbout 500 travel and landscape photographs from the Alps, Japan, Iceland and more are now for sale as prints, plus the metadata bug that cut 65 titles short.Both bugs had the same symptom: zerohttps://purplelink.llc/blog/both-bugs-had-the-same-symptom-zero/2026-09-20T12:00:00Z2026-09-20T12:00:00ZBuilding GlobePin's App Store analytics pipeline, I wrote code that treated absent data and broken requests identically. Two independent bugs, each enough to return nothing, sat undetected until Apple generated its first real reports.TikZ diagrams and tables in ModernTex, without writing either by handhttps://purplelink.llc/blog/tikz-and-tables-without-the-syntax/2026-09-13T12:00:00Z2026-09-13T12:00:00ZModernTex now has a visual TikZ designer with live preview, and a Table Editor that pastes straight from Excel — both still write plain LaTeX underneath.Checking your response letter before resubmissionhttps://purplelink.llc/blog/checking-your-response-letter-before-resubmission/2026-09-09T12:00:00Z2026-09-09T12:00:00ZA response letter can address every reviewer comment without actually resolving the underlying concern. This is how a researcher uses Response to Reviewers to check that gap before resubmitting.Detecting checkout without a click handlerhttps://purplelink.llc/blog/detecting-checkout-without-a-click-handler/2026-09-02T12:00:00Z2026-09-02T12:00:00ZThe kits page had visitors but Stripe showed no sessions. Here is how I instrumented the checkout boundary without adding click handlers to every buy button.What Your Literature Search Misseshttps://purplelink.llc/blog/what-your-literature-search-misses/2026-08-26T12:00:00Z2026-08-26T12:00:00ZMost missed citations aren't papers you forgot to read. They're papers in adjacent fields using different terminology for the same problem, invisible to a keyword search.The comment said this would breakhttps://purplelink.llc/blog/the-comment-said-this-would-break/2026-08-19T12:00:00Z2026-08-19T12:00:00ZThe Purplelink stats endpoint read event blobs one at a time, and the code even included a comment noting it would fail at higher volume. The failure arrived through latency rather than traffic spikes.Producing a diff PDF for journal resubmissionhttps://purplelink.llc/blog/producing-a-diff-pdf-for-journal-resubmission/2026-08-12T12:00:00Z2026-08-12T12:00:00ZMany journal submission portals require a diff PDF alongside a revised manuscript. Here is how a researcher uses Purplelink's LaTeX Diff tool to produce one without a local LaTeX installation.Why the cover letter generator doesn't see your manuscripthttps://purplelink.llc/blog/why-the-cover-letter-doesnt-see-your-manuscript/2026-08-05T12:00:00Z2026-08-05T12:00:00ZThe Purplelink cover letter generator takes only your abstract, not the full manuscript. Here's the capability and privacy reasoning behind that design choice.What counts as a run when the tool never calls the serverhttps://purplelink.llc/blog/what-counts-as-a-run/2026-07-29T12:00:00Z2026-07-29T12:00:00ZTwo Purplelink tools that compute entirely in the browser had no usage data, because instrumentation relied on intercepting backend calls. Fixing that required defining what a run actually means, and the answer differed by tool.What stays in a blinded manuscripthttps://purplelink.llc/blog/what-stays-in-a-blinded-manuscript/2026-07-22T12:00:00Z2026-07-22T12:00:00ZDouble-blind peer review requires more than removing your name from the title page. Grant numbers, IRB protocols, citation prose, and named software all identify you to a reviewer who knows your field.What OpenAlex returns when you ask for an abstracthttps://purplelink.llc/blog/what-openalex-returns-when-you-ask-for-an-abstract/2026-07-15T12:00:00Z2026-07-15T12:00:00ZOpenAlex stores paper abstracts as inverted indexes rather than strings. Building the Daily Digest's paper fetcher surfaced this, and the reconstruction has limits.Running your manuscript through Paper Reviewhttps://purplelink.llc/blog/running-your-manuscript-through-paper-review/2026-07-08T12:00:00Z2026-07-08T12:00:00ZPaper Review scans your manuscript before submission with four adversarial passes: figure integrity, citation cross-check, a multi-persona reviewer debate, and a prioritized checklist. Here is what using it looks like from a researcher's side.One curation call per dayhttps://purplelink.llc/blog/one-curation-call-per-day/2026-07-01T12:00:00Z2026-07-01T12:00:00ZThe Purplelink Daily Digest harvests 400-800 items daily and picks 20 to publish. Here's why the design uses a single AI curation call instead of scoring items one at a time.Keeping up when your research crosses fieldshttps://purplelink.llc/blog/keeping-up-when-your-research-crosses-fields/2026-06-24T12:00:00Z2026-06-24T12:00:00ZAcademic researchers who work across multiple fast-moving fields have no good daily briefing built for them. Here's why the existing infrastructure falls short, and what I built to fix it.Where BibTeX errors actually come fromhttps://purplelink.llc/blog/where-bibtex-errors-actually-come-from/2026-06-17T12:00:00Z2026-06-17T12:00:00ZMost BibTeX errors don't come from researchers making mistakes. They come from the bibliography managers and export tools researchers trust to get it right.Getting a research paper into an LLM without losing the mathhttps://purplelink.llc/blog/pdf-to-llm-without-losing-the-math/2026-06-10T12:00:00Z2026-06-10T12:00:00ZPDF text extraction breaks on tables and equations. Here's how a researcher uses Purplelink's PDF to Structured Data tool to get clean, LLM-ready text out of an academic paper.Seven free LaTeX tools, right in your browserhttps://purplelink.llc/blog/free-latex-tools/2026-05-28T12:00:00Z2026-09-04T12:00:00ZWe launched a free LaTeX tools page: compile to PDF, convert to and from Word, diff two versions, validate and build BibTeX, and render equations - no account, no install, nothing stored.Why we built Haea on-devicehttps://purplelink.llc/blog/why-haea-is-on-device/2026-05-27T12:00:00Z2026-05-31T12:00:00ZWhy Haea keeps all your health data on your iPhone - and why that decision shapes everything about how the app works.What GlobePin does that no other travel app doeshttps://purplelink.llc/blog/what-globepin-does-differently/2026-05-27T12:00:00Z2026-05-31T12:00:00ZWhy GlobePin is different from every travel tracking app on the market - and what we built that the others missed.The LaTeX editor that academics actually wanthttps://purplelink.llc/blog/the-latex-editor-academics-want/2026-05-27T12:00:00Z2026-09-04T12:00:00ZWhy existing LaTeX editors fail academic researchers - and what ModernTex does differently to serve the manuscript workflow.Starting Purplelinkhttps://purplelink.llc/blog/starting-purplelink/2026-05-27T12:00:00Z2026-09-04T12:00:00ZWhy I formed a software LLC, what I'm building with it, and the philosophy behind making software that's meant to last.