LaTeX
A tree made with qtree
So, I’ve been playing a lot with LaTeX the last few days (brought on, in part, but the LSA conference), and I’m really starting to like it.
You can see the results of my playing here (pdf).
Aside from being able to easily typeset really pretty trees, tables, and OT tableaux, a really neat feature of LaTeX is BibTeX, which manages your references. You create a reference database, which can contain pretty much every article you’ve ever read in your career, and then refer to that database in documents. It then automatically creates in-text citations and your references pages, all perfectly formatted [for those interested, my custom .bst, which I’ve been told is very nice, is online here].
That all being said, a question for the lazyweb: If you use LaTeX, how do you do versioning and/or change-tracking. I really don’t want to run CVS or SNV for my LaTeX files (I know that some people do that). It’s nice that in MS Word (yuck, I know) I can go back and see what sections I’ve cut, edited, or added, and when, and I’d like to have that functionality while working on my thesis. Is the best way to do it just to write and edit in Word, then follow up by typesetting in LaTeX? Doesn’t that defeat the point of LaTeX (to avoid dealing with formatting)? Thoughts in the comments are appreciated.
Posted on Wednesday, January 10th, 2007 at 1:52 pm. Categories: Linguistics, Lazyweb, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can also leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
11 Responses to “LaTeX”
Gordon Says:
January 10th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Braver, too bad. Use a version control system for version control. Also, your .bst link 404s. Pretty PDF, though.
Aaron Says:
January 10th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
.bst link fixinated. Maybe I’ll consider SVN — do you have any experience with it?
firespeaker Says:
January 11th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Use SVN. And Word has similar functionality with [again, not free] EndNote. I recommend against it though–bibtex is obviously superior
Josh Says:
January 11th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
Brandeis has a contract with Endnote, so it’s free for you…in case you make the switch.
Lance Says:
January 12th, 2007 at 12:36 am
Oh, sure, prove me wrong, pick up LaTeX within a few days, make me feel inadequate as a geek….
Aaron Says:
January 12th, 2007 at 1:54 am
Josh: That’s interesting - I wonder if it’d stay with us after graduation…
Lance: “picking up” LaTeX, I think, would be an overstatement. I was able to create that document with a lot of help from my good friend the interwebs. Especially these slides (helpfully entitled “LaTeX for linguists”).
firespeaker Says:
January 12th, 2007 at 2:07 am
Speaking of being made to feel inadequate as a geek in the context of LaTeX, …
Way back in 2002 or so when I first learned myself some LaTeX, someone living on my hall–a math major–saw me typing a linguistics assignment up in LaTeX, and asked me, “Are you programming your homework?” I chuckled and explained what LaTeX was, but he’d apparently heard of it before and just considered it to be .. a way to program homework. So he listed as I said all sorts of positive things about it, and then went off to his room so I could finish my homework.
The next evening, little more than 24 hours later, he comes into my room and says, “So I wrote my math homework in LaTeX while I was at the library today, but I couldn’t preview it.” And so I downloaded it from where he’d uploaded it on his school-provided webspace, and showed him how to make from it a dvi and–more importantly for him on Windows–a pdf. I was expecting it to fail with warnings and or errors on compile time, and walk through all his mistakes with him, and was quite surprised when it compiled on the first attempt. I was even more surprised when I found that his homework assignment was about 12 pages (single-spaced iirc, and I seem to remember a smallish font) of really complex math formulæ..
Granted, I think this guy might have some mild form of autism or other, but .. he wrote a dozen pages of complex math formulæ in LaTeX (not to mention that his other formatting was perfect) without being able to preview any of it–(on a whim?) while sitting at the library between classes. I also watched him teach himself how to juggle in the space of half an hour once. Someone else on our hall was convinced he was the next messiah. Probably not, but he did have great [eclectic] taste in [international] music and was always happy to spread the joy
Danny Silverman Says:
January 12th, 2007 at 11:57 am
Agreed with Gordon and firespeaker: if you want revision control, use a revision control system, they’re very good at it, and that’s the Linux Way ™. If CVS or SVN scare you (and CVS really isn’t that bad, if you can figure out LaTeX), perhaps try RCS, which I believe is drop-dead simple. Or throw all of your revisions into a wiki!
Aaron Says:
January 12th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
Danny: Huh, a wiki’s not a bad idea. The reason I’m hesitant to go with CVS or whatnot is because it’s hard to visualize what’s been changed in each update. With MS Word, I can see what I changed recently highlighted in red, etc, etc. I wonder if I could hack something together to import each edition of m’thesis into the wiki… Interesting…
Mike K. Says:
January 29th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
Perhaps the point is moot by now, but the prime candidate would indeed be SVN.
RCS is the precursor of CVS and provides good “single document” versioning.
To visualize changes you can just use diff, after all, that’s what wikis use! At work I use WinDiff which visualizes things in a rather pretty manner, I’m sure there are good Mac visual diff utilities.
I use vim for my latex, and besides allowing me to program all the fun latex compilation macros in so I can preview quickly, there are plenty of diff plugins and features for vim, so you can actually view the differences between different versions. It would be trivial to write a script that grabs the previous version of the current document off SVN, saves it to /tmp or somesuch, and displays the diff in-window in vim. I haven’t done this yet, but now that I think about it, I just might :>
Mike K. Says:
January 29th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
BTW, can you share the source for that PDF?
I could use it as a sort of cheatsheet for things I use more rarely, so I don’t have to peruse the wonderful but not too easily navigable latex for linguists.
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