Tex on Mac OS X

In one of my previous posts, I mentioned that I was taking two interesting subjects this semester: distributed systems and human computer interaction. What I did not mention was those two subjects were research intensive. For each of them, over the next two months, I will have to write a research proposal.

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!