From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.comp.tex.context/44368 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Aditya Mahajan Newsgroups: gmane.comp.tex.context Subject: Experience on writing a thesis with MKIV Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2008 12:35:39 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: Reply-To: mailing list for ConTeXt users NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1222533528 31098 80.91.229.12 (27 Sep 2008 16:38:48 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2008 16:38:48 +0000 (UTC) To: mailing list for ConTeXt users Original-X-From: ntg-context-bounces@ntg.nl Sat Sep 27 18:39:46 2008 connect(): Connection refused Return-path: Envelope-to: gctc-ntg-context-518@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from ronja.vet.uu.nl ([131.211.172.88] helo=ronja.ntg.nl) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1Kjcob-0000fe-Rx for gctc-ntg-context-518@m.gmane.org; Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:38:41 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by ronja.ntg.nl (Postfix) with ESMTP id B11111FEA5; Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:37:36 +0200 (CEST) Original-Received: from ronja.ntg.nl ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (smtp.ntg.nl [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with LMTP id 15474-01-3; Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:36:26 +0200 (CEST) Original-Received: from ronja.vet.uu.nl (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by ronja.ntg.nl (Postfix) with ESMTP id 81CC71FB77; Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:36:25 +0200 (CEST) Original-Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by ronja.ntg.nl (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7B9E41FB77 for ; Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:36:23 +0200 (CEST) Original-Received: from ronja.ntg.nl ([127.0.0.1]) by localhost (smtp.ntg.nl [127.0.0.1]) (amavisd-new, port 10024) with LMTP id 15474-01-2 for ; Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:35:42 +0200 (CEST) Original-Received: from tombraider.mr.itd.umich.edu (smtp.mail.umich.edu [141.211.93.161]) by ronja.ntg.nl (Postfix) with ESMTP id CBA6D1FB71 for ; Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:35:41 +0200 (CEST) Original-Received: FROM adi-laptop.local (c-68-32-92-64.hsd1.mi.comcast.net [68.32.92.64]) BY tombraider.mr.itd.umich.edu ID 48DE60DC.1595B.31950 ; 27 Sep 2008 12:35:40 -0400 User-Agent: Alpine 1.00 (DEB 882 2007-12-20) X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at ntg.nl X-BeenThere: ntg-context@ntg.nl X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.9 Precedence: list List-Id: mailing list for ConTeXt users List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Original-Sender: ntg-context-bounces@ntg.nl Errors-To: ntg-context-bounces@ntg.nl X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at ntg.nl Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.comp.tex.context:44368 Archived-At: Hi everyone, I finished my thesis, writing both my thesis and my presentation using ConTeXt. Thesis: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~adityam/publications/thesis/thesis.pdf Source: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~adityam/publications/thesis/thesis.tar.gz Presentation: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~adityam/publications/thesis/thesis-presentation.pdf Overall it was a pleasant experience, but there were some difficulties. I am summarizing my experience here. Hopefully, others will find it useful. * Layout and Formatting: It was extremely simple to set up the layout and formatting according to the thesis specifications. Due to the ease of changing formatting, I experimented quite a bit with the formatting before settling down to what is in the thesis (The school wanted "nothing fancy"). * Organizing large projects: The product-component structure made it easy to work on single chapters. However, I could not get correct numbering for the components (If I compiled chapter-02, it got numbered 1). In the end, I was just compiling the whole thesis at the time, since it was pretty fast (~10 sec). * Fonts: Using different fonts with MKIV was really easy. For the presentation, I did have some trouble in getting Euler to work with the minimals. Hopefully, this will be corrected soon. * Math: The math alignments worked very nicely, but I had to do a lot of manual tweaking at a lot of places. Also, equations seem to like to have a tendency of starting on a new page. I tried changing penalties for predisplay and postdisplay (which are set to zero), but it invariably led to bad page breaks at other places. At some places, the equation overlapped with the previous material. I am not sure what was causing this (medium interline spacing, wrong calculation of the width of the previous line, or something else). In the end, I simply put a few manual \break[small] here and there. Being able to write unicode math made simplified reading math markup. * Metapost: TeX-MP interaction is fast and easy. However, debugging metapost errors is difficult because context does not stop compiling on encountering a metapost error. * Bibliography. For a large part, the bib module was very easy. In the end, there were a few glitches with the formatting of the bibliography (too title space between entries) which I had to manually correct. (Look for \help inside the bbl file). The bbl file sorted authors with multiple entries incorrectly. If I had authors with four publications in a year, say 2000, the came out as 2000d, 2000c, 2000b, 2000a. I wanted 2000a, 2000b, 2000c, and 2000d, so in the end I just edited the bbl file by hand. There was also problem with maybe year. If I had 2000a and 2000b in the bib file, but only referred to 2000b in the thesis, the year came out as 2000b rather than 2000. For this also, I edited the bbl file by hand. Overall, ConTeXt made writing the thesis fairly easy. I mean the typesetting part of it. For those who are wondering, ConTeXt does not help with the content of the thesis :-) I would like to thank Hans and Taco for providing ConTeXt and everyone on the mailing list for answering my various questions. Aditya ___________________________________________________________________________________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : https://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___________________________________________________________________________________