[Techtalk] Applications for writing dissertation

[Aguido Horatio Davis]

On Sun, 13 Oct 2002, Stephanie Boyd wrote:

> It's an economics dissertation, so whatever I use must be able to deal well
> with equations.

Definitely TeX. TeX is a language and a compiler for that language.
Typically you get it, the rest of the toolset, and the standard libraries as
a coherent distribution. The standard distribution for Linux seems to be
tetex - at least that's what ships with Red Hat and Debian.

> The ability to either generate graphs or for me to easily insert graphs
> is also important.

I have a friend who uses Octave and/or Matlab for that kind of work and has
no trouble saving stuff to postscript and using LaTeX's "graphics" package
to include it in her documents. For general figures I use xfig likewise.

> Ideally, I'd like to be able to save in mutliple formats, but I must as
> least be able to print to a postscript file.

The standard compiler for TeX spits out DVI, or DeVice Independent files;
the dvips command will change those into postscript, and you can get
creative from there. There is also pdftex which renders straight to PDF and
something called LaTeX2HTML (http://www.latex2html.org/) which does just
that.

My favourite TeX book is "Math into LaTeX" by George Gratzer, but people
recommend Leslie Lamport's books (he is the perpetrator of LaTeX, the set of
macros which most people use instead of dealing with raw TeX). Also check
out tug.org and ctan.org for a set of useful starting points.

Cheers,

Horatio