[Nottingham] Bibliographic software

[Martin]

Iain Moppett wrote:

> Before you guys wax too lyrical about the joys of Tex, some of us 
> like the woolly clickyness of GUI - isn't Linux about choice? Besides
> which, my supervisor is a Word addict, and we exchange ideas via the
> comments / notes bits of Word /OOW.  I'm sure someone must have a
> GUI solution hidden away.


Very much so for choice.


I tried Word (on Win95C) and found the formatting hassles to be tedious
just for a 10 page document. I'm sure the latest Word works better if
you religiously use the styles and headings 'markers'.

I used Word (and its word processing features) to enter the text for
Latex to then do the hard stuff. (Word was good for text entry and for
formatting the references that Latex then used!)

So I guess I was using the best for me of both worlds.

Latex could also beautifully format equations and tables far better than
anything else on Win95.


The WYSIWIG comment is more of how best to view and do things. When
thesis hacking, are the words and content most important or do you
really want to be blinded by 'how it looks' as you're typing?

I found I could concentrate much better on the text, seeing it 'as
text'. It was then nice later to go to sleep having seen a preview of
those pages just to gauge whether things were nicely concise or too
bulky. The tidy up of the formatting came only in the last week. Most of
the tweaks were for hyphenation hints, and then biasing whether large
graphics came before or after their anchor paragraph for aesthetics.


A laser printed page might carry more visual 'authority' than a beer mat
scribble, but then you don't need much space for "E=mc^2".


OK, enough of my ramblings!

Good luck,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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