I am in the midde of writing my PhD qualifier paper and should be working on that rather than writing here. However I’ve been rather irritated lately with several things.
Of primary concern is my LaTeX front end editor. I use TeXnicCenter and have for about a year. My masters thesis and most of my term papers of the last nine months were written using it. The one HUUUUUGE problem that application has is its font choices. It only will display text in the editor using monospace fonts. Monospace fonts are horrible (for me anyway) to write with. They bother my eyes no end and make me less able to write. No, really. I’ve tested writing in Word 2007 and TeXnicCenter. My writing flows way easier in Word than in TeXnicCenter.
Lyx would be a great condender except that it is a WYSIWYG editor and not a straight LaTeX code editor. I prefer using code rather than formatted text. It also saves in a Lyx-specific file format. Yes, it can be exported back to LaTeX but I want it to be natively LaTeX.
WinEdt looks to be equivalent to TeXnicCenter except that it can use any font. Only problem there is that I have to have administrator rights to install it. And I don’t. It also costs $30 to use beyond the month-long trial period.
If only TeXnicCenter allowed fonts other than monospace!
On the BibTeX side of the equation my qualifier paper is now approaching 200 bibliography entries with associated PDFs on my harddrive. Currently I store PDF’s in directories related to what general subject the pertain. I make my BibTeX files by hand. Every entry is manually typed into a BibTeX document. I want some way to integrate all of that together.
So far I’ve tried Zotero, JabRef, and Mendeley. None are satisfactory for a variety of reasons. If all three could be blended together then we’d have something! Until then I continue to plod along as-is.
Amazing to find your post. I’m getting ready to write my phd prelim and am deciding on the route I’ll go for citations and overall writing. I’m asking myself a lot of the same questions you are going through.
To date I’ve used Word 2007 and Endnote for most papers. The Word 2007 eqn editor allowed me to go pretty fast, and endnote’s drag drop helped me go fast. I import lots of citations through Springerlink and IEEE explorer which saves lots of typing.
Just recently I’ve been trying out Mendeley. Mendeley is amazing for organizing and grabbing meta text (sometimes) from pdfs and checking scholar for correct titles. I also like the syncing which will allow me to work from several computers. Zotero has sync too. Endnote has endnote web but for some reason I just don’t use it a whole lot and just email my endnote files to myself.
But Mendeley ticked me off because several types of citations (web pages, and thesis specifially) would not show up correct using IEEE styles. And Mendeley doesn’t allow you to customize the styles like endnote.I have to use IEEE format so am totally at their Mendeley’s mercy
I’ve heard of some people using Mendeley to organize then using the sync feature to sync to bibtex and then using that to work with Jabref or other latex citation tool.
I’ve only started playing around with Zotero, I don’t like the look as much and the integration with Firefox. And I haven’t tried drag/dropping references into Word yet. Endnote is sort of kludgy but I still like it with Word. But I am scared when I start getting into big documents.
I’m torn between going the Master document/sub document route on word 2007 vs technixcenter. I haven’t learned latex or technixcenter and can go decently fast in Word. I try to follow good habits and format everything in Word using only styles. Other tips beyond styles, and breaking the document into subdocuments was to turn off the pictures viewing and use place holders instead.
I do like the professional look of latex, but have been shying away from the learning curve, especially since the word 2007 eqn editor is fairly powerful.
Since writing that post last year, I’ve decided to stick with JabRef and a system of haphazardly organized folders containing all of the article PDFs. I’ve also stuck with TexNic Center. Several of the other LaTeX editors I tried didn’t cut it for various reasons. As I’ve become more proficient with LaTeX, I’ve become more comfortable writing directly in LaTeX. It has been very beneficial as I can quickly pump out beautifully formatted documents with little formatting effort.
Also having all of my citations in JabRef has made me very nimble with being able to cite things that I have used in past documents. The very minimal user interface is a real plus.
Someday someone will develop the perfect solution to our organization and editing problems. Until then, I think I’ll stick with my current solution.
Good luck with your prelim!