From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.comp.tex.context/44380 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Mikael Persson" Newsgroups: gmane.comp.tex.context Subject: Re: Experience on writing a thesis with MKIV Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2008 17:45:20 +0200 Message-ID: References: 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 1222616830 27812 80.91.229.12 (28 Sep 2008 15:47:10 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 28 Sep 2008 15:47:10 +0000 (UTC) To: "mailing list for ConTeXt users" Original-X-From: ntg-context-bounces@ntg.nl Sun Sep 28 17:48:07 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 1KjyVC-0001A2-QQ for gctc-ntg-context-518@m.gmane.org; Sun, 28 Sep 2008 17:48:06 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by ronja.ntg.nl (Postfix) with ESMTP id C49BD1FDEA; Sun, 28 Sep 2008 17:47:00 +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 08448-01-7; Sun, 28 Sep 2008 17:46:00 +0200 (CEST) Original-Received: from ronja.vet.uu.nl (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by ronja.ntg.nl (Postfix) with ESMTP id D5B8D1FDD7; Sun, 28 Sep 2008 17:45:59 +0200 (CEST) Original-Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by ronja.ntg.nl (Postfix) with ESMTP id 061F41FDD7 for ; Sun, 28 Sep 2008 17:45:54 +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 08448-01-6 for ; Sun, 28 Sep 2008 17:45:21 +0200 (CEST) Original-Received: from fk-out-0910.google.com (fk-out-0910.google.com [209.85.128.185]) by ronja.ntg.nl (Postfix) with ESMTP id ECFBF1FB64 for ; Sun, 28 Sep 2008 17:45:20 +0200 (CEST) Original-Received: by fk-out-0910.google.com with SMTP id 18so1763350fks.2 for ; Sun, 28 Sep 2008 08:45:20 -0700 (PDT) Original-Received: by 10.180.239.8 with SMTP id m8mr1829023bkh.48.1222616720573; Sun, 28 Sep 2008 08:45:20 -0700 (PDT) Original-Received: by 10.181.37.10 with HTTP; Sun, 28 Sep 2008 08:45:20 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: Content-Disposition: inline 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:44380 Archived-At: Wow, that looks very nice! I hope you do not feel I am stealing your thread now (I do not mean to). I did also finish my thesis (in mathematics) recently, written "in ConTeXt". For this I had a lot of help with your doc "Using \startalign and friends", thank you. The thesis is available at http://www.math.chalmers.se/~mickep/mp-thesis-final.pdf and a short presentation of the third paper http://www.math.chalmers.se/~mickep/pres.pdf Some comments: * At our university the thesis should be printed on the (not really standard) G5 paper. No problem in defining and using it with ConTeXt. * The bibliography uses Taco's module. I am happy of being able to have different bibliographies in one file. * As a mathematician I was a bit tired of the computer modern fonts (I really like them, but I see them to often), so I decided to go with the utopia/fourier fonts. This forced me to work with mkii, since I did not get these fonts to work with mkiv (This is still a problem, I am not sure how to go on with it for future documents). * Typesetting math worked very smoothly. There is one place where I hade to add some negative vertical space (I could not reproduce this in a minimal file). * I'm very happy with the way MetaPost and ConTeXt work together. * The presentation is inspired by Thomas A. Schmitz' files at http://www.tug.org/pracjourn/2006-2/schmitz/ (thanks!) * The presentation uses Wolfram's Mathematica fonts which I find being very clear. I will happily continue to use ConTeXt in future projects. /Micke P On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 6:35 PM, Aditya Mahajan wrote: > 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 > ___________________________________________________________________________________ > ___________________________________________________________________________________ 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 ___________________________________________________________________________________