Aditya Mahajan wrote: > Hi everyone, > > I finished my thesis, writing both my thesis and my presentation using > ConTeXt.
congratulations! > Thesis: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~adityam/publications/thesis/thesis.pdf impressive and it also looks nice (the large interline spacing even looks ok -) > Source: > http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~adityam/publications/thesis/thesis.tar.gz > > Presentation: > http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~adityam/publications/thesis/thesis-presentation.pdf > > Overall it was a pleasant experience, but there were some difficulties. I > am summarizing my experience here. Hopefully, others will find it useful. > > * Layout and Formatting: It was extremely simple to set up the layout and > formatting according to the thesis specifications. Due to the ease of > changing formatting, I experimented quite a bit with the formatting before > settling down to what is in the thesis (The school wanted "nothing > fancy"). at least they gave you the freedom to play with fonts > * Organizing large projects: The product-component structure made it easy > to work on single chapters. However, I could not get correct numbering for > the components (If I compiled chapter-02, it got numbered 1). In the end, > I was just compiling the whole thesis at the time, since it was pretty > fast (~10 sec). there is a \setuphead[chapter][file=..] option which should do the job (remin dme to implement that in the upcoming mkiv sectioning mechanisms as well) > * Fonts: Using different fonts with MKIV was really easy. For the > presentation, I did have some trouble in getting Euler to work with the > minimals. Hopefully, this will be corrected soon. indeed; anyhow, your thesis proofs that luatex can be used for real production > * Math: The math alignments worked very nicely, but I had to do a lot of > manual tweaking at a lot of places. Also, equations seem to like to have a > tendency of starting on a new page. I tried changing penalties for > predisplay and postdisplay (which are set to zero), but it invariably led > to bad page breaks at other places. > > At some places, the equation overlapped with the previous material. I am > not sure what was causing this (medium interline spacing, wrong > calculation of the width of the previous line, or something else). In the > end, I simply put a few manual \break[small] here and there. in mkiv we can redo the before/after math spacing because there we have the control that we wanted > Being able to write unicode math made simplified reading math markup. > > * Metapost: TeX-MP interaction is fast and easy. However, debugging > metapost errors is difficult because context does not stop compiling on > encountering a metapost error. ok, remind me to implement a 'show error when mp fails' mechanism (we may need a way to trigger tex's error mode then from within luatex then; somethin gis possible now but a bit hackery) > * Bibliography. For a large part, the bib module was very easy. In the > end, there were a few glitches with the formatting of the bibliography > (too title space between entries) which I had to manually correct. (Look > for \help inside the bbl file). > > The bbl file sorted authors with multiple entries incorrectly. If I had > authors with four publications in a year, say 2000, the came out as 2000d, > 2000c, 2000b, 2000a. I wanted 2000a, 2000b, 2000c, and 2000d, so in the > end I just edited the bbl file by hand. > > There was also problem with maybe year. If I had 2000a and 2000b in the > bib file, but only referred to 2000b in the thesis, the year came out as > 2000b rather than 2000. For this also, I edited the bbl file by hand. i like the bibliography layout > Overall, ConTeXt made writing the thesis fairly easy. I mean the > typesetting part of it. For those who are wondering, ConTeXt does not help > with the content of the thesis :-) I would like to thank Hans and Taco for > providing ConTeXt and everyone on the mailing list for answering my > various questions. Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl ----------------------------------------------------------------- ___________________________________________________________________________________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : https://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___________________________________________________________________________________
