Writing Theses with LaTeX/LyX and Companions

It is interesting to observe that different (scientific) communities seem to use different tools for writing their publications.

Nature and computer scientists seem to use LaTeX (or any of its derivatives) for everything. You can recognize that on first sight. Simply open any random paper from arxiv.org. They all look the same, because they are all rendered using the same technique, because they are all written using the same technique.

Then there are social scientists. They seem to be writing in various formats. Few use LaTeX, but others seem to prefer the standard text processing tools (namely MS Word). You can tell because their documents show different interpretations of some more or less defined formal standards (hierarchy, foot notes, citations). And they use Arial and Times New Roman (because they might think this is part of the standards, too ).

And then there are designers. Designers do whatever they like in order to bring type to paper/PDF. I myself used Adobe InDesign for my “Vordiplom” (pre examination) documents, which proved to be very impractical. Of course, it’s possible to control every little aspect of appearance, but there is no support for managing footnotes, margin notes, literature references and so on.

As the previous post indicates, I am just writing theses again and this time I decided to go the LaTeX way. It has everything you need for writing, and it prevents you from dealing with appearance too early. Because I think that simplifies the task drastically I am using LyX, a kind-of-WYSIWYG frontend for LaTeX. As LaTeX, LyX is well known in the UNIX/Linux community, but not at all known on Windows and MacOS platforms. Unreasonably, as I think, as there are ports for Win32 and Mac OS X. It performs well on Windows (for me even faster than under Linux) and allows me to create nice, hyperlinked PDF documents with the press of a button. It allows for navigation through the document via the outline (Table of Contents) tree. It renders citations in the german DIN 1505 style, if I want. It generates table of contents, list of tables and list of figures automatically. It would also help me to generate keyword indexes, if I needed them.

To those Windows/Mac OS folks it might be worthwhile to note that we are talking free software here. That means: No cost, clear conscience.

The next task will be to find out how to customize the output document, as there are quite some things I don’t like yet. For example the difficult control of float elements (such as figures) in LaTeX. However, if everything else fails, there is still LaTeX2RTF which should make it simple to move the whole contents to InDesign.

In case you would like to test LyX yourself:

1. Install a TeX system first. I recommend MikTex
2. Go to http://www.home.zonnet.nl/rareitsma/lyx/ and download your LyX version of choice. I use 1.3.3.
3. Run LyX.
4. Open the “Introduction” from the Help menu, if LyX doesn’t do it for you, and read it. The LyX documentation is really comprehensive and exists in many languages.
5. Optional: If you want to manage bibliography data, use a BibTeX management tool like JabRef.

Update (08/07/2006): Meanwhile, the windows support has improved drastically. You can simply download the complete installer package (~ 70 MB) from the LyX Wiki Site. It gets you up and running in record time.