Shama Writer
Research writing on your machine.
Version 1. Sources to PDF. Qur'an & hadith built in. No account. Works offline.
Open it in a browser on a tablet, laptop, or desktop.
GitHub
Five
stages
Islamic
sources
Codex
Layout &
export
17 layout presets
APA, IEEE two-column, ACM, Springer LNCS, Elsevier, Nature, Science, PLOS; thesis, Chicago/Turabian, MLA, course essay; monograph, report, grant. One click sets paper size, margins, point size, spacing, and columns from the published guideline.
59 citation styles
Grouped, searchable, and each one compiled and checked. The picker shows what a style prints, like (Turing, 1950), [1], a superscript number, or a footnote, beside its name. Bring your own .csl too.
26 paper sizes
A-series, B/C envelopes, US Letter and Legal, business cards, presentation slides. Margins in cm, in, mm, or pt.
Headers, footers, page numbers
A page number that sits where you put it (left, center, or right) in its own size, not just an on/off switch.
Heading numbering & spacing
1. / 1.1 / legal (I, A, 1) numbering, or none. Line spacing set independently for each of six heading levels.
~100 fonts, or your own
Serif, sans, and monospace families ship with the app and load only when a paper uses one. Upload a .ttf or .otf and it typesets alongside them. Nothing else about the paper changes.
Word, when they ask for it
Export a real .docx. Your margin notes arrive as Word comments and your footnotes as Word footnotes, so a supervisor can reply with tracked changes, the one thing a PDF can never do.
Retractions, caught
One click asks Crossref, which holds the Retraction Watch database, whether anything in your library has been retracted, corrected, or had a concern raised since you saved it. Retracted work gets cited for years because nobody goes back to look.
Paste a link, get a source
A journal page, an arXiv or PubMed address, a DOI, or an ordinary web page. The details are fetched where they exist, and where a browser genuinely cannot read the page it says so instead of guessing a title.
Real exit doors
Export PDF, a Word .docx, a .tex for a LaTeX co-author, or the whole project as real Typst files (main.typ, chapters, refs.bib) that compile outside this app entirely.
Now on Android
Shama Writer, native on your phone.
The full editor (sources, Qur'an & hadith, arguments, 59 citation styles, ~100 fonts, and a real Typst PDF compiled on the device) running natively, no browser. Local-first, offline, free.
About writer
Why local-first
Nothing leaves your machine unless you ask it to.
No account to lose, no server to go down, no company deciding one day to shut it off. Your sources, your arguments, your Codex: saved in your browser, on your device, exportable to real files whenever you want out. That is the whole design, not a feature of it.
Local. Everything stays in your browser. Offline. PDF compiles in the tab. Free. MIT.
Literature from OpenAlex, PubMed, and Semantic Scholar. Qur'an text from quran.com, transliteration from alquran.cloud, hadith from the fawazahmed0 hadith-api, real, citable sources, not a black box.
v1 ships Document mode, Typst, and Codex now. Version 2 will upgrade the visual editor further.
Founder
Maaz Ahmad: concept, structure, and design
Contributors
- Zachary Adam: development · app, Typst pipeline, local-first architecture
- Muhammad Hammad Ul Islam: QA reviewer · found and reported bugs through hands-on testing