The Akashic Field Chronicle

On my previous post, I showed you why you should be ditchin’ MS Word and instead learning LaTeX. In this post, I’ll give a very short glimpse of my basic workflow when using LaTeX. Which programs I use? Is there any particular way I use them? Hopefully this will get you started (if you haven’t yet) on mastering LaTeX for those technical papers.

I run all these programs in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), either on my laptop or on a desktop PC. They are all free and open source software (FOSS). Don’t worry if you don’t use Linux (although you should), because most, if not all of the programs run in other platforms (Windows, Mac, etc.). That, or they probably have counterparts that behave very similarly.

PDFLaTeX

This is the program I use to generate the actual PDF file from the .tex file. Yes it’s command line only and doesn’t have fancy graphics. But if you’re converting a .tex file, do you really need fancy graphics?! Just run pdflatex [filename] on your trusty console and voila! You’ve got a perfect pdf every time. I also like the fact that it’s very fast and simple and could easily be added into scripts for batch jobs or what have you. You can even run it remotely if you ever find a reason to do so. Try that with a graphical program!

Vim

This is what I “should” be using to type the actual .tex manuscript. This is the editor that I’m trying to master. As of now, I suck and would rather edit my manuscript in gedit. I have to admit, Vim is very very very powerful and once you learn most of the tricks it has up its sleeves, then you’ll definitely regret not having learned it earlier. So this is what I’d recommend for the people who are willing to invest some time on learning a true blue text editor. There’s a pretty good tutorial here.

LyX

Although we love the CLI and would love to master LaTeX in its raw and true form, there are just some tasks when a graphical interface is best. One very good example I’ve seen, is trying to create tables. If you’ve ever created tables in HTML then you know that it can be a pain in the *rse.

There are also some formula formatting whose syntax are really hard to remember in LaTeX. For these special circumstances, I use the program LyX, which I’ve mentioned on my previous post. It’s a GUI for LaTeX and it does a very good job at it. However I seem to get better looking results as well as more customization when using PDFLaTeX. What I do is to use a raw .tex file for the stuff I know, and then use LyX to create tables, formulas and such. These snippets can easily be exported to pdflatex by going to File > Export > Latex (PDFLatex) in LyX.

JabRef

Now this program is seriously a Godsend. No more worrying about whether a reference was cited properly. No more fumbling around at the last moment for a reference that you forgot to jot down. This program will keep a database of all your BibTeX entries. That is to say, all your reference including most data required for a citation. It has all the powerful features of most databases, such as searching and replacing. Did I mention that these BibTex entries are available from CiteSeer and IEEEXplore? Head on over to sourceforge to get your copy.

OpenOffice.org Drawing and Dia

The easiest and best way to embed pictures onto your PDF document is to also have them in PDF format, or some other vector format such as EPS. This way, you don’t get pixelized output even if you resize your pictures unlike when using bitmap based pictures (.bmp, .gif, .jpg). These formats are frowned upon by journals and conferences because they don’t scale well.

For my drawing needs, I use OpenOffice.org Drawing, as well as a very neat diagramming program called Dia.

That’s all there is to it and you could have this system up in a few minutes. I recommend that you install LyX first because this would install all the required LaTeX components. Also, if you are in Windows, you could also try out TeXnicCenter according to a comment from my previous post.

Happy TeXing!

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P.S. I’ve upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.6 (from 2.5.1). So far I haven’t noticed anything different. But at least I learned the upgrade process and didn’t mess it up.