Ahh the procrastination when writing a PhD.
Instead of actually writing it, you research a million different ways how to render it, and then you write a blog post on it :)
Instead of actually writing it, you research a million different ways how to render it, and then you write a blog post on it :)
I ended up falling way too deep into the Rabbit hole, and started using NixOS just to write the thesis itself. It did eventually result in a fun blog post, though!
https://shen.hong.io/nixos-for-philosophy-installing-firefox...
And then he continued publishing books about typography, in his spare time, for the next few decades.
My advice is: Remember, nobody's going to read it.
My parents' theses were about 50 pages, typewritten, equations and chemical diagrams entered by hand. The got the same grade as I did. ;-)
1. The majority of people just don't care very much. Just get LaTeX working locally, get it to run the packages you need - amsmath, etc. - and start working on your mathematics.
2. There is a large minority who dive deep into the rabbithole on their editing environment, typography, diagramming, etc.
Amusingly, you can tell how likely someone is to fall into either camp based on the amount of care they take with and over their notes (mostly hand-written in my day).
My conclusion is that writing a thesis fucking sucks and damaged me.
You can just write the text, and write the equations between dollar signs, and it renders you book quality output by default.
(You also can tweak it as much as you want it, and spend as much time as you want it on it.)
But once I was done, I wanted to blow off some steam and started writing a silly little tabletop RPG. I decided the rulebook would be text-only for portability with box drawing borders and ASCII tables and stuff, so I spent the first week or so writing a small ASCII typesetting engine in Prolog (because logic programmer).
And then automated the ToC and section numbering .
And then I spent more time writing a vim syntax file so I could read the glorious ASCII with syntax highlighting.
Here:
https://github.com/stassa/nests-and-insects
I'm still looking for ANSI/ ASCII art contributions btw.
Not so fast. You also need to try a million different SSGs for your blog, then eventually write your own.