So, yesterday I managed to copy our department’s official LaTeX template and set it up for my own needs - and write some 2 pages of actual text for the introduction! As I mentioned before, all of the text will probably end up scraped off the face of the earth later, but most importantly, some of my ideas are now actually down in writing in a format nearly comprehensible for other people. Only some 60 pages to go

On the tool front, I’ve been using TeXlipse, which I grew to like when using it in a couple of earlier university projects. In addition to basic LaTeX syntax highlighting capabilities, it offers some neat little completions, such as automatically matching a \begin{something} with an \end{something}, and also automatically completing my BibTex citations for me (see screenshot below.) TeXlipse does have its quirks, but overall it’s pretty great. Its development seems to have died down, though, so trying to open an empty BibTex file will cause you problems to the unforeseeable future.

TeXlipse has a simple but efficient model for generating a PDF of your LaTeX sources: you simply point out the main LaTeX file in your project, select the output format (and the command used to produce the output), and you’re off. Now, whenever you make changes to your source files and save, TeXlipse bakes you a fresh PDF in the background. Thus, my writing cycle is simply write, save and “reload” in my PDF reader.

In addition to TeXlipse, I’m using a tool called Rubber for keeping the LaTeX compilation process nice and clean when run from the command line (Rubber and LaTeX, gotta love the kinky vocabulary of scientific writing.)

All of my LaTeX source files are under version control, naturally. My tool of choice is Git, which I’ve been playing around with in all of my recent projects. My usage of Git is far from complex, and I’m definitely not bending the tool’s limits: I’m basically just enjoying the possibility of committing locally when I’m offline.

Now, off to get some sleep. More coherent thoughts tomorrow, hopefully.