Now, one big problem is that Microsoft Word and most other text editors are not adapted to this type of presentation. To make my life easier, I will have to use a Tex-based document processor.
In this post, I point out the ones that I will be evaluating, so as to help other OS X users spend less time wondering what to do.
I have found three interesting document processors for OS X:
- LyX: available for all major operating systems. Can be downloaded at http://www.lyx.org
- TexShop: available at http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop
- iTexMac: which can be downloaded from http://itexmac.sourceforge.net
- And of course, for all the die-hard *Nixers out there, there exists the nice combination of GVim and VIM-LaTeX.
I will be evaluating the 3 software above. If you've completed research-based assignments before, you definitely would agree with me that another major headache lies in the bibliography (also known as references). I have heard great stuff about BibDesk which is a piece of software that can be used just for that purpose.
- BibDesk: http://bibdesk.sourceforge.net
Cheers!
It's a noble inquiry! I've had great luck with TexShop as a GUI, at least. It uses PDFLatex by default, and it does its rendering pretty quickly.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was writing my thesis, however, I was doing a lot of changes to my bibliography and I needed everything to be built every time (typically you have to build your doc once with LaTeX, then build the bib with BibTex, then build your doc again to get the bib in there, then build it at least once more to get the references correct). To streamline this I went the Makefile/latex/dvips route, while still using TexShop as the GUI.
The one thing to remember if you end up swapping between LaTeX flavors is that they tend to support different image types (for graphs, diagrams, etc.). PDFLatex loves PNG, while latex/dvips loves EPS.
Other than that, have fun! :)