Linux Software - (Jun/28/2012 )

pito on Sat Jul 7 19:03:59 2012 said:

Yeah, it took a bit of time and effort to learn the basics, and I still have to go back and look up some things now and again, but the packages come with full documentation and there is an excellent wikibook online for geting most stuff right, not to mention googling just about anything will get you a useable answer (though not necessarily the best answer). The hardest part i have found is getting a good package for doing the specialist things I want (e.g.writing chemical formulae, SI units, multiple page figures), as there are usually lots of options or different ways of doing things, which will give you more or less the same output but are more cumbersome/difficult to write. For example you can write chem formulae by writing the letters and then entering math mode to make super/subscripts, or you can use a package such as mhchem and write \ce{formula here} and it will output it nicely.

I mostly got into it because i was sick of bloody endnote and word crashing when I was writing anything with over 100 refs or anything that was image heavy.

Drawbacks include having to get the context of your stuff just right for everything, remembering to put all the brackets in (though the processing will tell you when and where you have done this). Having to have all the images in a separate folder forces you to have to come up with a useful naming system to avoid confusing yourself, which can be a bit of a pain and means you have to take all your images and copy them from the parent files (e.g. if you have a series of images of the same thing but only want one, you have to make a copy and put it intothe image folder).

For a first start I submitted an App for the Ubuntu App Showdown Contest:

http://snowflakestefanie.blogspot.de/

At the moment it is still under reviewing, I'll post the link as soon as it is in the Ubuntu Software Center. If you like try, comment and rate it