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.