On Wed, May 03, 2000 at 07:36:57PM -0400, Karthik Vishwanath wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have yet to perform a software search on freshmeat and linux.com, but
> was wondering if I get some input from here... Is there any good utility
> that makes writing scientific papers a tad more easier?! The ppl in my lab
> use this thing called "endnote" that has a plugin to msword and while
> writing a paper and quoting references I can just use the paper reference
> from endnote. It makes life easier since if I later add a paragraph, the
> references renumber themselves correctly etc. So I was wondering if a tool
> akin to this exists for members of this community?
Any time I have to write a paper of more than about a single paragraph
I use a package called Latex. It's a markup language along the lines
of HTML. But it is designed towards creating printed output instead
of on-screen output like HTML.
Basically, what you do is write your paper in any text editor - my
personal preference is emacs, but you could use whatever editor
you prefer - and then run the resulting file through a processing
program. The output from that program is a .dvi file (that stands
for Device Independant file). That file can then either be printed
directly or it may be further processed into a variety of different
formats. I usually create a Postscript file, but other formats are
possible including PDF and HTML.
Latex is a set of extension macros to the language Tex, which was
designed by Donald Knuth to be used in typesetting mathematical
texts. As such, Latex has *very* thorough mathematical text
capability. I've dealt with the equation editor in Word, and
I have found that once you get the basics in Latex equations are
*much* easier to do in Latex than in Word. Also Latex makes things
like internal cross-referencing and footnotes very easy.
Granted it takes a little bit of effort to learn the tags used by
Latex, but I have found the result to be *well* worth the effort.
The Linux package for Latex is called Tetex (no, I don't know why),
and there are also many extension packages available.
--
Mike Werner KA8YSD | "Where do you want to go today?"
ICQ# 12934898 | "As far from Redmond as possible!"
'91 GS500E |
Morgantown WV | Only dead fish go with the flow.
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