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Re: Making graphic available for Latex ( on Mac)


From: Quentin Spencer
Subject: Re: Making graphic available for Latex ( on Mac)
Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2005 13:24:10 -0600
User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.9 (X11/20041127)

Henry F. Mollet wrote:

LaTeX ­ A document preparation system
My question: If I had LaTex installed on my iMac with OS 10.2.8 would it
take the place of MSWord X for producing my final document for submission to
scientific journal. Or on my next Mac when Tiger comes out, LaTeX can take
the place of MSWord and I won't need it at all?
Definitely. I have never used Word for submitting to journals. For an example of what is possible, you can look at my PhD dissertation, which was completely generated using LaTeX:
http://patriot.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd378.pdf
All simulations were done in octave, and all plots were generated using octave/gnuplot. In order to put math expressions in the plot, I usually output my plots to xfig format (see the gnuplot documentation for more), and then use xfig and transfig (this process is automated using makefiles) to generate eps files (other ways of doing this have been covered recently on this list). I don't know whether xfig and transfig are readily available for Mac without building it yourself (which apparently is not necessarily straightforward).

In my experience, LaTeX has a bit of a steep learning curve, but GUI interfaces like LyX now exist which make the process more like a word processor (but still not exactly the same). However, no other program does mathematical typesetting as well as LaTeX (in addition to the fact that you pointed out that MS still doesn't understand anybody's vector graphics formats other than their own). When I review papers by other authors, I can instantly tell which authors used LaTeX and which used Word from the ugly looking equations.

-Quentin



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