TeX editor to write your thesis

After a long hang out session with my best buddy, Lenovo T60p, (without much sleep and proscrastinations, of course :D) finally I finish the writing assignment and have spare time to do MY things... yeah!

(yet, still hanging out with my T60p)

(Geeks? only God knows :P )

Speak for the truth, I'm too tired to playaround somewhere. Sleeping for approximately 3 hours a day hasn't really be my habit. However, I'm glad that now it's all over. Only one more tiny step to end yet this another phase in life.

Writing thesis reports requires tremendous patience and concentration. You need to be consistent throughout your writings. Do not introduce new terms or use new style of writings throughout the documents. Be precise and be aware of your grammars, as unsuitable sentences may cause misleading interpretations. Make sure that you cite proper publications. Etc...

Fortunately, I found several tools that could help me along the way. First, and arguably the most important part, is the correct text editor. Most people, including me, use popular text editor such as Microsoft word or Open Office (I know somebody who used it :p ) to write documents. So to say, these are the most convenient text editor to produce documents. What else are more convenient than WYSIWYG text editors? But for documents with math formulas and formal definitions with a lot of citations, I have to say that these text editors are a level behind TeX editors. Why?

1. TeX editors doesn't bother you with layout, except in the early phase of your document creation.
   
2. TeX editors creates all of your citation index perfectly.
   
3. TeX editors can merge several text documents to a single output file. Means that you can write each chapter of your thesis in one document, make it easily managed.
   
4. TeX editors are (as far as I know) open source. Free with quality, I would say.
   

The only drawback, creating documents using TeX editors is like creating computer programs (which of course, is a grose for many people). First, you write your text. Then, you compile it to PDF (or PostScript format), and you'll get your document! The most horrible thing is... you write documents with syntaxes. Yes... Syntaxes!! To make your text style bold, you have to write it between curly brackets (e.g. to make a text "cool" looks bold in your output, you need to type it \bold{cool} ). And... you can't see your document unless you often compile it (except using one TeX editor which I forgot! :( ) .

In my university, most people use WinEdt as their TeX editor. You can also use other TeX editors. But first, you need have a TeX compiler installed in your computer. For my thesis, I used MiKTeX 2.7. Next, install your favorite TeX editor. You can use a "real" text editors such as WinEdt and Crimson Editor, but I prefer to use LyX. It is an intermediate between the "real" text editors and WYSIWYG text editors such as Microsoft Word. You don't have to understand TeX syntaxes, just type your text as if you are working in WYSIWYG text editors. However, you can still insert "raw" TeX syntaxes in between your document. You'll be an expert in TeX in any moment :) If you already have your favorite TeX editor installed before you install TeX compiler, you just have to attach the compiler to your TeX editor.

It's easier to work based on a template in LyX. For my thesis, I use this template. Thanks to my good 'ol friend, Chitra, who helped me find the basis of this template (she also found it somewhere in the Internet). I modified it a little bit based on my need. Open the "thesis.lyx" with your LyX editor to start to use it. Hope it can help you guys, in case you need it for your thesis/final project report.

Well, time to prepare some slides. Wish me the best everyone!

p.s:

• in TeX document, it is better to use graphics with ".eps" format. Based on my personal experience and my tutor's advice, to obtain this format from a graph that we created, the best practice would be creating the graph using Microsoft Visio, select the part of the graph to be inserted, and save as ".wmf" document. Then, using this tool, convert the document to ".eps" format. Sad to say, but IMHO, Visio is still the number one for the usability vs functionality. I hope someday there'll be open source version of Visio :D

• Picture is taken from here.