Which is best to use for writing a large scientic document (one that will include plenty of figures and references)?

I am experimenting with Latex at the moment.

I have no prior experience of either.

Of course I can use word, who can't? But I mean use word more comprehensively than your standard press a key on the keyboard, insert a picture and save.

I used word for my thesis. i found it fantastically rubbish for manipulating diagrams. And as soon as word documents get to a certain size they start getting a bit messed up. I saved each sectioni as a seperate file to avoid losing too much in one go.

I've never heard of latex being used to write documents before...

I avoided the word thesis, as there is no guarantee I will get to the finish line yet :) I am trying hard though, plenty of more hurdles to overcome yet.

Your thoughts seem to concur with some other people I have spoken to in that you struggle with word with large documents.

Must admit - I always tend to go for latex if the option is there....:heyhey:

Originally posted by msbehavin
Must admit - I always tend to go for latex if the option is there....:heyhey:
Doing what it says on the tin.

Spooky... I had this conversation just yesterday... I'm in the process of writing my first year report for my PhD and agree that MS Word is absolutely rubbish at handling diagrams and large numbers of references etc. I've nearly finished it now but I wish I'd used an alternative.

Tim, how did you handle references in Word? Did you use endnote or something like that? I considered putting my work into chapters and saving those as individual documents, but that messes my references up :suspect:

I followed this guide http://www.math.auc.dk/~dethlef/Tips/introduction.html and am using Bibtex.

I think I am going to try for one chapter and see how I get on?

Thats soooo spooky - I also just had this same conversion the other day - how wierd is that?!?

Your plan sounds excellent skatiechik - I did exactly the same just to check it would do everything i might want. The key to successful LaTeXing is to let the computer do the thinking about layout and just worry about the logical structure of the document, and of course the content.

Do an chapter and print it from Latex, and also from word - compare them (i did this, and there was no comparison ;) )

LaTeX handles figure/table captioning/references and especially equations much much better than Word.

You should check out:

www.miktex.org - install it from there - its a very good site/version

Also look out for a piece of software called "TeXnicCenter" (www.toolscenter.org) which is a reasonably good front end for the MikTeX Installation.

Also check out the newsgroup comp.text.tex which is haunted by all kinds of LaTeX/TeX boffins - even if you never ask a question you will learn tons by browsing it.

I still retain some memory of how to do basic stuff in LaTeX (enough for a thesis ;) ) so if you need help, let me know.


good luck!

Originally posted by TracieJC

Tim, how did you handle references in Word? Did you use endnote or something like that? I considered putting my work into chapters and saving those as individual documents, but that messes my references up :suspect:

Didnt really have many references, so I just put them in manually. Wrote a list at the end. putting in several files does screw up you page numbers and stuff, like I say word is a pain in the arrse. There must be a better alternative.

I know plenty of people who used Endnote, but personally I found it was fine to do them manually (I had about 6 pages of refs which isn't that many, but it's respectable). I guess it depends on your referencing style - I used Harvard which refers to Author (year), and so you just flick to your references chapter and add it in the relevant place. If you use a proper numbered way to reference them, I guess this is a nightmare way to do it :)

And I did my thesis fine in Word. After trying master documents once, I stuck to a separate file for each chapter. This adds an extra few minutes to sort out the page numbers when you print, but it's really not that much hassle! I've never really seen the need for Latex, and my engineering thesis had its fair share of complex equations and formatting!

My other tip would be to always draw your diagrams in a separate program (personally I used CorelDraw, but it seems to be a matter of taste), and export as jpeg - something always managed to go wrong with pasting objects, whatever format you use! At least you know a graphics format will import fine, and I have more faith in Corel's rendering filters than Word.. And keep up to date with Office versions and patches - I had hassle with sub/superscripts and greek characters on axis labels, but Office service packs gradually sorted those out!