Re: I need some advices/guidelines before start writing my PhD thesis

[Christopher Creutzig <christopher@creutzig.de>]

Alexandra Ribeiro wrote:

> At this moment I’ve to make a choice: continue using Word or start 
> learning a new tool, which will probably consume much of my time. So, 
> I’m in a dilemma. That’s why I’m asking for help.

  Off the top of my head, I'd say you have to ask yourself at least the 
following questions:

- How much time are you willing to spend on a tool?
- How much do you *really* bother about the final appearance?
- What formats is your PhD advisor happy with?
- Assuming you would like to reuse some parts of your thesis for
   independent publications, what formats do the journals in your
   field accept?
- How much help do you need when learning?  How much of this
   can come from a mailing list (and its archives), how much
   must be presented in book format and how much face-to-face
   introduction do you need?  What do people around you know
   and use?

> Is it really worth learning Context? I mean, does this package deal 

  It depends.  For me, definitely, but I've long reached the area in 
LaTeX where doing what I want to do means hacking around the design 
limitations of that system – and that probably implies that I'll have a 
hard time being satisfied by InDesign, OOo or whatever program limited 
by the WYSIWYG approach.

> efficiently with some important things like TOC, cross-references, 
> bibliography, figures, math, …?

  Certainly.  (You did not mention footnotes and multiple indices, but I 
regard those as crucial in any typesetting tool, too.)

>                                 Is it too hard to learn (for a mere 
> mortal, of course)?

  It depends.  The worst thing about ConTeXt is its almost complete lack 
of error diagnostics.  Forget a curly brace somewhere or mistype the 
name of an option and you'll probably spend hours looking for it, the 
first couple of times.  It certainly helps to have some programming 
experience.

>                      What about support for different languages, in 
> particular for Portuguese?

  I don't know any Portuguese, but multiple languages are supported.

> If I choose Context, can some somebody give me some guidelines/advices?

  Do read the manual.  Print it and have it next to your computer.  Make 
notes in there.

  After reading the manual, go to contextgarden.net and click on “Random 
Page” a couple of times.  Do this every morning – you will find a lot of 
things which are completely irrelevant to you (and solve problems of 
others, which is why they are there), but the occasional gem is worth 
the time.


Christopher