Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

Whilst we're all here... can anyone recommend a piece of software for writing a thesis?

I'm struggling with MS Word at the moment as I seem to be locked into a fight to the death with Styles.

I've tried Scientific Workplace but actually found it to be such a non-intuitive interface that I consider it a substantial obstacle to overcome.

Currently I'm: Using MS Word to: * Layout the document, keep track of references and figures. Using MS Excel to: * Produce charts Using MS Visio to: * Produce images of graphs * Produce images of database schemas

It works, but it's clunky and those damned Styles are driving me nuts.

I'd love: * A LaTeX engine for Windows that makes things very easy to get started and very intuitive. * A way of generating charts and having a lot of control over the precise layout of the charts * A way of producing tables (database schema), vector graphics (graphs, and also relations for those database schema) * Keep track of my references in a way that can automatically update the master document and produce the bibliography

In my mind this should be a LaTeX application and perhaps something else for the references. But I'll be damned if I've ever managed to find something that makes adopting and using it as easy as I want it to be, and so I stick with MS Office.

Please help! Before these styles ruin my day again.

I wrote my thesis in LaTeX under Windows. My tools were:

1. http://www.texniccenter.org/ Great UI to get you up and running. You still type in LaTeX markup, but you can compile to PS or PDF very quickly.

2. OpenOffice to produce the images, which are exported as PDF. LaTeX has a way to include PDF files directly into the output.

3. For anything else, get a PDF printer and generate PDFs that way. You might need a PDF editor to set the bounding boxes properly though, so it will take some hacking.

4. For bibliography, I used a very hacked up system. EndNote allowed export in a format that LaTeX understood, except that it had a bug in the output markup. So I wrote a quick PHP script to fix that and add a unique, deterministic, ID for each reference so I can refer to it in the text. Worked a treat.

I used Mendeley for my bibliography, which I can really recommend, and it exports to bibtex as well. I ended up rewriting most of my bibtex (and a custom bibliography-style file), but it was nice as a start, regardless.

I make most of my with xfig and export to .eps. I also use the LaTeX package psfrag to include LaTeX math formulae in images.

I'm using Inkscape instead of xfig for drwaing graphics.

However, there's also TikZ -- a LaTeX package that takes the descriptive approach to graphics: You describe what you want and get almost always a very nice picture that fits perfectly with the rest of your LaTeX document:

http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/

TikZ comes with an amazingly good manual:

http://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/graphics/pgf/base/doc/generi...

I knew about pgf, in fact I've made learning it my new year's resolution. It is indeed amazing. I didn't know the texample.net website though, thanks.

For bibliography I used JabRef (http://jabref.sourceforge.net)

It's written in Java, and is very simple to use.

I recommend LaTeX for typesetting and emacs for editing (it's not WYSIWYG, though). I found the MIT thesis templates to be extremely easy to use and produced excellent output with minimal hassles. (My thesis was just an undergrad thesis, with a relatively small number of figures. I will admit the figures were the most difficult part, but even there they were totally manageable and I never considered myself locked in any death fight.)

It was 17 years ago that I wrote my thesis, but I quickly googled and found some samples online: http://web.mit.edu/olh/Latex/Sample-thesis/index.html

Why not go with LaTeX? LaTeX can make tables, and can embed graphics made in other programs.

I make graphics using R (r-project.org), save as PDF, and embed them in my documents. This makes sense, because R also generates the numbers behind the graphs, and it leaves me with PDFs that can also go directly into presentations and web pages.

LaTeX has packages for making drawings, but it doesn't shine there compared to other tools.

LaTeX will get you excellent results if you master it. I don't think you can get comparable results using anything except for professional typesetting software and a lot of manual labor. But LaTeX will cost you a lot of effort to get right, and you will not get it right without a LaTeX expert coming in to help you.

If, however, you aren't great with LaTeX, I'd use Pages on a Mac, with LaTeXit for equations and EndNote to manage your bibliography. Styles in Pages really work well and make editing large documents easier, not more complex. EndNote integration is clunky, but works. The only major drawback is lack of support for numbered equations and figures in Pages.

Mind you, I'm not saying this is the perfect solution, but it is much better than Word or OpenOffice.

Might want to look at Lyx. Doesn't have all the features you want though.

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