I used to write my papers in Latex using Kile (a KDE Latex IDE) - but several limitations like having to use external tools for versioning, missing integrated literature management and limited extendibility made me look for an alternative solution.
Being an Eclipse user & RCP developer, I immediately though of customizing Eclipse for writing scientific publications aka papers. Here is a short description of the configuration I currently use:
Programs / Plugins
- Eclipse 3.4 as baseline
- TexClipse for writing Latex
- EclipseWiki for writing notes on read literature using a wiki style in the workspace
- A local Subversion server for versioning my changes
- Subversive for connecting to subversion
General Configuration
- file association (under Preferences) *.bib to my favorite bibliography tool (KBibTex)
- file association *.pdf to preferred PDF viewer
- Wiki settings to use TWiki (Preferences/Wiki/Rendering) for historical reasons
Subversion / Workspace layout
- no trunk/branches/tags, just plain project name (I believe that this is not necessary because typical publications do not require branching etc. as far as I see it)
- for each publication I write, I have a separate project, e.g. paper_conferenceA_2008
- there is a bibliography project with the bibliography.bib file used by all projects (by \bibliography{../bibliography/bibliography} - when I finish a paper I copy the current bibliography to that project and change the reference to the copy (to it from breaking in the future))
- in the bibliography project, I have a literature folder containing .wiki (notes) and .pdf (paper itself) files for the papers I read. That way, I can search my notes and find the papers. The name for both is firstauthorname_yearX, X being a,b,c... depending on the number of publications from that author in that year.
Project configuration
- Latex Project Properties/temporary files directory: tmp (excluded in subversion)
- output as DVI
The advantages of using such a configuration are:
- if you are used to Eclipse, you can rely on this knowledge (e.g. shortcuts)
- integrated versioning support
- notes, papers, and bibliography at one place
- opportunity to develop additional tooling (visualizations, search, etc.)
- mostly platform independent
I might have missed some details of my configuration - if you notice something not quite working or unclear, please comment on this post.
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
29 May 2008
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