On Tuesday 19 April 2005 19:44, Rich Drewes wrote: > Serious Word users would point to EndNote and say that tools like > BibTex/Pybliographic are toys in comparison. (EndNote supports importing > BibTex, BTW.) For certain things they are right--BibTex+Pybliographic > handles the basics well, but there are some very powerful features that > EndNote and associated packages can do like create maps of references so > you can identify key sources. One big issue here is that such third party add-ons for Word are usually paid their LOC in gold. Another problem is the quite frequent instabillity derived by "overloading" word with such bells and whistles. I can't tell anything about EndNote since I haven't used it, but ReferenceManager in its days had blown up in my face more than once. I would also be rather careful in dismissing bibtex and latex's support for bibliography in general as a toy. Please keep in mind that you can rather easily change "formatting" of the references anytime you please while still not messing (and thus loosing time) with the actual archive. You can also SQL-query for references if your university library offers such service. I for one, consider the TexMed web interface a god send.
> There are good equation packages (third party) for Word as well, I am > told. It depends on what you consider as good. The main problem with math under word is mainly the "point & click" paradigm that will cost you hours to no end before you can format half a dozen equations (e.g. "boxed", center-aligned and equation number "right-aligned"), while in LaTeX these things in most cases work "out-of-the-box". > For my thesis I chose to go with Lyx and Pybliographic because OpenOffice > wasn't up to the bibliographic task as far as I can tell. OO.org's bibliography is far better than whatever "hack" you can get with the native MS Word endnotes. Wether that's good enough of course depends on your necessities, since LaTeX is even better. > I will probably > use Beamer for my thesis defense (all my other presentations so far have > been with OO Impress). Beamer all the way! The graphic quality obtained is not even dreamed of for most office-suite users (MS or otherwise). Choose the right theme for you, spend a couple of minutes fine-tuning colours and then type away in the most casual way. You have a thesis presentation in about an hour (as personal experience teaches me). > It has been quite a bit of work getting Lyx to > conform to my University's formatting conventions but I managed it all, > finally, with appropriate ERT in the Lyx doc. I did not have the time to > spend writing my own document class. In the enrd it is working out well, > and the result looks great, but I would not recommend this approach at > this point to someone who wasn't really into open source and fiddling with > software. On this point I'll have to agree that a LaTeX class-generating dialog application of some sort would do miracles in improving user-friendliness and ease-of-deployment for either Lyx or any other LaTeX-based solution. As for not reccomending TeX to people that have no idea about software, I think we all agree. That's why office-suites are so succesful and popular to begin with: the pesky typewritter emulation environment requires much less of the user than understanding the basic workings of a markup language. Now Lyx and other editors (like Kile which is not WYSIWG but offers most LaTeX options on dropdown menus and auto-completes code) provide us with the ability to write LaTeX-based documents without knowing by heart the ins and outs of the language and without opening HOW-TOs and browsing books every couple of lines, but still, some basic knowledge is required to get you going.
