Re: Thesis/Dissertation authoring application
On 4/24/05, Rhys Hardwick <rhys@rhyshardwick.co.uk> wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone knew of a good open-source program for writing
> Theses, Dissertations, Journal articles, etc. Open office, AbiWord etc are
> all good word processors, but there must be a program that is specifically
> for the porpus of writing these types of things.
>
> If anyone knows of anything like this, that would be fantastic!
LaTeX (also called latex, and available as package tetex-bin, though
you might also want tetex-extra and tetex-doc) is a great type-setting
program. You get a lot of control over how things are displayed, if
you need it, though there's a lot that it can do completely on its
own. If you're preparing a thesis, your university might actually
provide a template as a class or style file. Many journals also
provide style files for articles.
What's really nice is that if you're preparing a simple text document,
you need a few header lines, a footer line, and the rest can just be
typed as plain text with a blank line between paragraphs. Latex will
take that and turn it into a professional-looking document. You can
then add floating figures and tables, generate tables of contents, and
so on. Where latex really dramatically out-shines other programs is
mathematical typesetting. If you do a lot of this, you'll wonder how
you ever got by without latex.
--
Michael A. Marsh
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~mmarsh
http://mamarsh.blogspot.com
Reply to: