[Techtalk] Applications for writing dissertation

Telsa Gwynne hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk
Sun Oct 13 21:33:05 EST 2002


On Sun, Oct 13, 2002 at 07:57:34PM +0100 or thereabouts, Stephanie Boyd wrote:
> I have a very large (10,000 word) written piece to write for 
> university early next year.  As I have switched to using Linux 
> full-time, I don't really want to use windows if at all possible.
[snip] 
> Anyway, it has been suggested that I could use a mark-up language 
> such as DocBook or LaTex.
[snip]
> It's an economics dissertation, so whatever I use must be able 
> to deal well with equations.  The ability to either generate graphs 
> or for me to easily insert graphs is also important.  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.
> 
> I don't know if I'm asking for the moon-on-a-stick here, but 
> if any of you have opinions as to what would be my best bet, 
> I'd be most grateful. 

LaTeX is famously good at equations. I know very little about
it, but even I know it does equations well. I don't know about 
LaTeX and graphs, but I have many friends who wrote their 
dissertations in LaTeX. Some of them must have needed graphs.

DocBook is great for marking up computer-related things. If you
want to mark up <guimenuentry>s or <structfield>s or <keysym>s,
then you can't go far wrong with DocBook. But if you want -- 
I dunno, what sorts of terms does economics use? Well, anyway,
I imagine economics terms are not so well catered for in DocBook.
There might be an economics DTD which is a cousin of DocBook.
The problem there is finding the tools for editing and generating
text from it. If you are lucky, someone has written them for Linux. 
If not, you have more of a problem. 

DocBook isn't great at equations or graphs. It can include images.
But images of equations or graphs -- well. You'd still need to create 
them somehow -- and it just seems a really icky "solution". 

Despite the fact that I am reasonably familiar with DocBook and
can just about manage to mark up "this is a bulleted list" in
LaTex, if I needed graphs, equations, and non-computer-markup,
I'd be straight over to Google typing "LaTeX tutorials" :) 

Telsa



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