Re: [SLUG] Academic research software
Not sure if TeXmacs has been mentioned, but its basically in the same vein as Lyx, except better in some aspects. The main difference is that TeXmacs isn't exactly just a GUI ontop of LaTeX -- it uses its own format and commands (which are quite similar to LaTeX), however it recognizes LaTeX commands. If you know LaTeX you can construct documents very efficiently in TeXmacs, especially very efficient typing of equations and such.. better than just using a place text file (you'll have to try it out to really see why). The big issue though, is that for a complicated document you will probably have to export to LaTeX and tweak some thigs. But its exportation to LaTeX is by no means perfect, so there are a few issues there. Nevertheless the efficiency with which you can type mathematics in it is unsurpassed. Has a lot of potential. -Beren On Wed, Feb 28, 2007 at 11:29:20AM +1100, Alan L Tyree wrote: On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 11:11:57 +1100 Joseph Goncalves [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, Russell Davie wrote: snip Kile is a more user-friendly KDE-based TeX/LaTeX editor: http://kile.sourceforge.net/ KBibTeX specifically targets the bibliography features of LaTeX: http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=27421 More user friendly? How so if Kile requires the user to learn LaTeX markup language before they can produce a document? LyX enables a user to produce a document without having to learn LaTeX. This is avoids the significant and extra LaTeX learning curve. LaTeX markup language is really easy to use, but when it comes to changing the default layout, it gets complicated. LaTeX markup is far superior when you have repetitive patterns that you need to use. Personally I use latex-suite in vim than the GUI based Kile. And VIM has a far steeper learning curve than LaTeX. But like learning to Touch Type, the learning curve of Vim is well worth it. This is true, but in my experience it is not always on the point. Some people are simply put off by having the markup visible on screen. I don't know why this is so, but I have seen it in experienced as well as inexperienced users. There is something about having a footnote in the middle of a paragraph that freaks them out. Cheers, Alan If you have a aptitude for programming then definitely learn LaTeX. Here is a link to a really good LaTeX FAQ that teaches you to do stuff that will be hard to find otherwise... http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html -- Joseph Goncalves mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 66D6 71CF 87F9 6B17 6824 C692 9FF0 1DAF 7DAE E661 -- It is said that the Fremen has no conscience, having lost it in a burning desire for revenge. This is foolish. Only the rawest primitive and the sociopath have no conscience. The Fremen possesses a highly evolved worldview centered on the welfare of his people. His sense of belonging to the community is almost stronger than his sense of self. It is only to outsiders that these desert dwellers seem brutish . . . just as outsiders appear to them. -- PARDOT KYNES, The People of Arrakis -- Alan L Tyreehttp://www2.austlii.edu.au/~alan Tel: +61 2 4782 2670Mobile: +61 427 486 206 Fax: +61 2 4782 7092FWD: 615662 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Academic research software
On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 12:34:26PM +1100, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote: On Mon, 26 Feb 2007, Gavin Carr [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi all, I've just had a friend ask me whether there's anything in the free software world for academic research / writing i.e. tracking bibliographic info, citations, quotes etc., and then collating them into a written product. Any cluesticks? What do you real academics out there use (without wanting to start an editor and/or word processor war!). There are a number of tools available to aid research. OpenOffice.org has for a long time had functionality to manage sources and bibliographic entries. Two standalone apps which come to mind are Tomboy[1] and BasKet[2]. For Web-based research, it might make sense to manage sources within the Web browser itself. There are several extensions for Firefox to do this[3], including Zotero[4], Research Buddy[5], and Diigo[6]. [1] http://www.gnome.org/projects/tomboy/ [2] http://basket.kde.org/ [3] https://addons.mozilla.org/search.php?q=researchtype=Eapp=firefox [4] http://www.zotero.org/ [5] http://researchbuddy.mozdev.org/ [6] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2792/ Thanks a lot to all who replied - I've got a swag of things to go away and try out now. Should be fun! Cheers, Gavin -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Academic research software
On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, Russell Davie wrote: snip Kile is a more user-friendly KDE-based TeX/LaTeX editor: http://kile.sourceforge.net/ KBibTeX specifically targets the bibliography features of LaTeX: http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=27421 More user friendly? How so if Kile requires the user to learn LaTeX markup language before they can produce a document? LyX enables a user to produce a document without having to learn LaTeX. This is avoids the significant and extra LaTeX learning curve. LaTeX markup language is really easy to use, but when it comes to changing the default layout, it gets complicated. LaTeX markup is far superior when you have repetitive patterns that you need to use. Personally I use latex-suite in vim than the GUI based Kile. And VIM has a far steeper learning curve than LaTeX. But like learning to Touch Type, the learning curve of Vim is well worth it. If you have a aptitude for programming then definitely learn LaTeX. Here is a link to a really good LaTeX FAQ that teaches you to do stuff that will be hard to find otherwise... http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html -- Joseph Goncalves mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 66D6 71CF 87F9 6B17 6824 C692 9FF0 1DAF 7DAE E661 -- It is said that the Fremen has no conscience, having lost it in a burning desire for revenge. This is foolish. Only the rawest primitive and the sociopath have no conscience. The Fremen possesses a highly evolved worldview centered on the welfare of his people. His sense of belonging to the community is almost stronger than his sense of self. It is only to outsiders that these desert dwellers seem brutish . . . just as outsiders appear to them. -- PARDOT KYNES, The People of Arrakis pgpvSuLh1GEAg.pgp Description: PGP signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Academic research software
On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 11:11:57 +1100 Joseph Goncalves [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, Russell Davie wrote: snip Kile is a more user-friendly KDE-based TeX/LaTeX editor: http://kile.sourceforge.net/ KBibTeX specifically targets the bibliography features of LaTeX: http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=27421 More user friendly? How so if Kile requires the user to learn LaTeX markup language before they can produce a document? LyX enables a user to produce a document without having to learn LaTeX. This is avoids the significant and extra LaTeX learning curve. LaTeX markup language is really easy to use, but when it comes to changing the default layout, it gets complicated. LaTeX markup is far superior when you have repetitive patterns that you need to use. Personally I use latex-suite in vim than the GUI based Kile. And VIM has a far steeper learning curve than LaTeX. But like learning to Touch Type, the learning curve of Vim is well worth it. This is true, but in my experience it is not always on the point. Some people are simply put off by having the markup visible on screen. I don't know why this is so, but I have seen it in experienced as well as inexperienced users. There is something about having a footnote in the middle of a paragraph that freaks them out. Cheers, Alan If you have a aptitude for programming then definitely learn LaTeX. Here is a link to a really good LaTeX FAQ that teaches you to do stuff that will be hard to find otherwise... http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html -- Joseph Goncalves mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 66D6 71CF 87F9 6B17 6824 C692 9FF0 1DAF 7DAE E661 -- It is said that the Fremen has no conscience, having lost it in a burning desire for revenge. This is foolish. Only the rawest primitive and the sociopath have no conscience. The Fremen possesses a highly evolved worldview centered on the welfare of his people. His sense of belonging to the community is almost stronger than his sense of self. It is only to outsiders that these desert dwellers seem brutish . . . just as outsiders appear to them. -- PARDOT KYNES, The People of Arrakis -- Alan L Tyreehttp://www2.austlii.edu.au/~alan Tel: +61 2 4782 2670Mobile: +61 427 486 206 Fax: +61 2 4782 7092FWD: 615662 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Academic research software
On Wed, 28 Feb 2007, Alan L Tyree wrote: On Wed, 28 Feb 2007 11:11:57 +1100 Joseph Goncalves [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, Russell Davie wrote: snip Kile is a more user-friendly KDE-based TeX/LaTeX editor: http://kile.sourceforge.net/ KBibTeX specifically targets the bibliography features of LaTeX: http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=27421 More user friendly? How so if Kile requires the user to learn LaTeX markup language before they can produce a document? LyX enables a user to produce a document without having to learn LaTeX. This is avoids the significant and extra LaTeX learning curve. LaTeX markup language is really easy to use, but when it comes to changing the default layout, it gets complicated. LaTeX markup is far superior when you have repetitive patterns that you need to use. Personally I use latex-suite in vim than the GUI based Kile. And VIM has a far steeper learning curve than LaTeX. But like learning to Touch Type, the learning curve of Vim is well worth it. This is true, but in my experience it is not always on the point. Some people are simply put off by having the markup visible on screen. I don't know why this is so, but I have seen it in experienced as well as inexperienced users. There is something about having a footnote in the middle of a paragraph that freaks them out. True... LaTeX editing is a paradigm shift that may be too great for some people. Fair enough. This is where LyX is great alternative because it is a WYSIWYG editor that works with a simple but effective text file format that is human editable. Cheers, Alan If you have a aptitude for programming then definitely learn LaTeX. Here is a link to a really good LaTeX FAQ that teaches you to do stuff that will be hard to find otherwise... http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html -- Joseph Goncalves mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 66D6 71CF 87F9 6B17 6824 C692 9FF0 1DAF 7DAE E661 -- It is said that the Fremen has no conscience, having lost it in a burning desire for revenge. This is foolish. Only the rawest primitive and the sociopath have no conscience. The Fremen possesses a highly evolved worldview centered on the welfare of his people. His sense of belonging to the community is almost stronger than his sense of self. It is only to outsiders that these desert dwellers seem brutish . . . just as outsiders appear to them. -- PARDOT KYNES, The People of Arrakis -- Alan L Tyreehttp://www2.austlii.edu.au/~alan Tel: +61 2 4782 2670Mobile: +61 427 486 206 Fax: +61 2 4782 7092FWD: 615662 -- Joseph Goncalves mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 66D6 71CF 87F9 6B17 6824 C692 9FF0 1DAF 7DAE E661 -- Tonight's special, blackened leftovers pgpu34PbkCVNu.pgp Description: PGP signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Academic research software
On Mon, 26 Feb 2007 18:18:30 +1100 Robert Thorsby [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 2007.02.26 17:09 Gavin Carr wrote: I've just had a friend ask me whether there's anything in the free software world for academic research / writing i.e. tracking bibliographic info, citations, quotes etc., and then collating them into a written product. He's used a commercial Windows product called Nota Bene before: http://www.notabene.com/product_tour_overview1.html Sounds like the sort of thing that much be an itch for lots of academics, but I've not run across anything more specialised like this in the free software world. LyX has templates for nearly all major academic thesis/treatise styles and has all the usual bells and whistles regarding toc, citations, bibliographies, etc. I think it has been ported to W...$ Yes, LyX is good. I have just used it to layout and typeset a cookbook written by my wife. A very smooth and pleasant experience. No bibliographic references, but it was easy to do cross references and a good index. The only thing it lacks is a good outliner. The other interesting thing was that the LaTeX code that it exported was very clean. I would use it more, but there is no clean support for multiple indexes. They are possible using ERT entries, but that negates some of the advantages of using LyX. Cheers, Alan Robert Thorsby -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- Alan L Tyreehttp://www2.austlii.edu.au/~alan Tel: +61 2 4782 2670Mobile: +61 427 486 206 Fax: +61 2 4782 7092FWD: 615662 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Academic research software
On Mon, 26 Feb 2007, Gavin Carr [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi all, I've just had a friend ask me whether there's anything in the free software world for academic research / writing i.e. tracking bibliographic info, citations, quotes etc., and then collating them into a written product. He's used a commercial Windows product called Nota Bene before: http://www.notabene.com/product_tour_overview1.html Sounds like the sort of thing that much be an itch for lots of academics, but I've not run across anything more specialised like this in the free software world. Any cluesticks? What do you real academics out there use (without wanting to start an editor and/or word processor war!). There are a number of tools available to aid research. OpenOffice.org has for a long time had functionality to manage sources and bibliographic entries. Two standalone apps which come to mind are Tomboy[1] and BasKet[2]. For Web-based research, it might make sense to manage sources within the Web browser itself. There are several extensions for Firefox to do this[3], including Zotero[4], Research Buddy[5], and Diigo[6]. [1] http://www.gnome.org/projects/tomboy/ [2] http://basket.kde.org/ [3] https://addons.mozilla.org/search.php?q=researchtype=Eapp=firefox [4] http://www.zotero.org/ [5] http://researchbuddy.mozdev.org/ [6] https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2792/ -- that's one thing I like about the Microsoft culture - is that we wake up every day thinking about companies like Wang - Bill Gates, ABC News (USA), 2005-02-16 pgpPlvOZ36jWh.pgp Description: PGP signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Academic research software
On Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:09:00 +1100 Gavin Carr [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi all, I've just had a friend ask me whether there's anything in the free software world for academic research / writing i.e. tracking bibliographic info, citations, quotes etc., and then collating them into a written product. He's used a commercial Windows product called Nota Bene before: http://www.notabene.com/product_tour_overview1.html Sounds like the sort of thing that much be an itch for lots of academics, but I've not run across anything more specialised like this in the free software world. Any cluesticks? What do you real academics out there use (without wanting to start an editor and/or word processor war!). Cheers, Gavin -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html For document editing: LyX is front end for LaTeX and in current development and regular updates available. http://www.lyx.org/ now version 1.5.0 in beta, very slick improvement over previous versions. To manage bibliographic db: Pybilographer http://www.pybliographer.org/ can also do medline searches, AFAIK not any other databases. JabRef http://jabref.sourceforge.net/ can also do medline searches, plus others Citeseer uses Java so is much bigger than Pyblilographer on a limited mem machine cheers Russell -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Academic research software
On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, Russell Davie [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:09:00 +1100 Gavin Carr [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi all, I've just had a friend ask me whether there's anything in the free software world for academic research / writing i.e. tracking bibliographic info, citations, quotes etc., and then collating them into a written product. For document editing: LyX is front end for LaTeX and in current development and regular updates available. http://www.lyx.org/ now version 1.5.0 in beta, very slick improvement over previous versions. Kile is a more user-friendly KDE-based TeX/LaTeX editor: http://kile.sourceforge.net/ KBibTeX specifically targets the bibliography features of LaTeX: http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=27421 -- I don't know what a monopoly is until someone tells me. - Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer pgp6DVL3j2Gvd.pgp Description: PGP signature -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Academic research software
On Tue, 27 Feb 2007 16:06:41 +1100 Sridhar Dhanapalan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, Russell Davie [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:09:00 +1100 Gavin Carr [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi all, I've just had a friend ask me whether there's anything in the free software world for academic research / writing i.e. tracking bibliographic info, citations, quotes etc., and then collating them into a written product. For document editing: LyX is front end for LaTeX and in current development and regular updates available. http://www.lyx.org/ now version 1.5.0 in beta, very slick improvement over previous versions. Kile is a more user-friendly KDE-based TeX/LaTeX editor: http://kile.sourceforge.net/ KBibTeX specifically targets the bibliography features of LaTeX: http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=27421 More user friendly? How so if Kile requires the user to learn LaTeX markup language before they can produce a document? LyX enables a user to produce a document without having to learn LaTeX. This is avoids the significant and extra LaTeX learning curve. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
[SLUG] Academic research software
Hi all, I've just had a friend ask me whether there's anything in the free software world for academic research / writing i.e. tracking bibliographic info, citations, quotes etc., and then collating them into a written product. He's used a commercial Windows product called Nota Bene before: http://www.notabene.com/product_tour_overview1.html Sounds like the sort of thing that much be an itch for lots of academics, but I've not run across anything more specialised like this in the free software world. Any cluesticks? What do you real academics out there use (without wanting to start an editor and/or word processor war!). Cheers, Gavin -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Academic research software
Gavin Carr wrote: Hi all, I've just had a friend ask me whether there's anything in the free software world for academic research / writing i.e. tracking bibliographic info, citations, quotes etc., and then collating them into a written product. He's used a commercial Windows product called Nota Bene before: http://www.notabene.com/product_tour_overview1.html Sounds like the sort of thing that much be an itch for lots of academics, but I've not run across anything more specialised like this in the free software world. Any cluesticks? What do you real academics out there use (without wanting to start an editor and/or word processor war!). As he is using Windows he might like to look at this: http://www.wibtex.de/ It appears to interface to BibTeX which is the standard for biblio data in the UNIX/Linux world but also works with MS Word. I have not tried it myself. I just use gvim and raw bibtex files. Mike -- Michael Lake Computational Research Support Unit Science Faculty, UTS Ph: 9514 2238 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Academic research software
On Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:20:15 +1100 Michael Lake [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Gavin Carr wrote: Hi all, I've just had a friend ask me whether there's anything in the free software world for academic research / writing i.e. tracking bibliographic info, citations, quotes etc., and then collating them into a written product. He's used a commercial Windows product called Nota Bene before: http://www.notabene.com/product_tour_overview1.html Sounds like the sort of thing that much be an itch for lots of academics, but I've not run across anything more specialised like this in the free software world. Any cluesticks? What do you real academics out there use (without wanting to start an editor and/or word processor war!). As he is using Windows he might like to look at this: http://www.wibtex.de/ It appears to interface to BibTeX which is the standard for biblio data in the UNIX/Linux world but also works with MS Word. I have not tried it myself. I just use gvim and raw bibtex files. I use Emacs + Auctex + Reftex to write in LaTeX as a replacement for Nota Bene. BibTeX does the same thing (only better) as the Nota Bene system. Reftex gives the consistent citation stuff. Emacs searces (not to mention more powerful find, etc) do the searching stuff. In addition, you get consistent multiple indexes. I think it is better, but I haven't used Nota Bene in quite a few years. Alan Mike -- Michael Lake Computational Research Support Unit Science Faculty, UTS Ph: 9514 2238 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html -- Alan L Tyreehttp://www2.austlii.edu.au/~alan Tel: +61 2 4782 2670Mobile: +61 427 486 206 Fax: +61 2 4782 7092FWD: 615662 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
Re: [SLUG] Academic research software
On 2007.02.26 17:09 Gavin Carr wrote: I've just had a friend ask me whether there's anything in the free software world for academic research / writing i.e. tracking bibliographic info, citations, quotes etc., and then collating them into a written product. He's used a commercial Windows product called Nota Bene before: http://www.notabene.com/product_tour_overview1.html Sounds like the sort of thing that much be an itch for lots of academics, but I've not run across anything more specialised like this in the free software world. LyX has templates for nearly all major academic thesis/treatise styles and has all the usual bells and whistles regarding toc, citations, bibliographies, etc. I think it has been ported to W...$ Robert Thorsby -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
