Main · Latex

This page was last modified on 29 October 2008, at 01:03 NZST

I have been using LaTeX since 2000, mostly for writing long documents and teaching material. This year I came across Dario Taraborelli’s excellent The Beauty of LaTeX article and his list of tools, from where I learned about XeLaTeX. Now I use XeLaTeX—the unicode and Mac OS X fonts enabled version of LaTeX—together with the fontspec package for all long projects.

My typical preamble includes:

⚠ (:source lang=latex:)[@ \documentclass[11pt]{article} <:vspace> % Mathematical symbols. \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{amsbsy} <:vspace> % Graphics management. \usepackage{graphicx} <:vspace> % Setting up the use of mac fonts. This requires XeLaTeX. \usepackage{fontspec} \defaultfontfeatures{Scale=MatchLowercase} \setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Century Schoolbook} \setsansfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Optima} \setmonofont{Monaco} <:vspace> % Use of unicode in my writings. \usepackage{xunicode} <:vspace> % Reference management \usepackage[round]{natbib} <:vspace> % Additional control of page layout. % See geometry.pdf \usepackage{geometry} \geometry{a4paper} % or letter or a5paper, etc <:vspace> <:vspace> \title{Title for the paper} \author{Luis A. Apiolaza\\ School of Forestry, University of Canterbury} \date{October 2008} % delete this line to display the current date @]

On terms of writing tools, I have been using TexShop as my main writing environment. However, after coming across with emacs two weeks ago, I have been trying writing with Aquamacs. It is still too early to see if I will continue using Aquamacs. All of my references are contained in BibDesk, after importing them from Endnote (a system that I really dislike).

The worst part of reference management is to type in all the new references. I have been using Zotero—a Firefox extension—to capture reference’s information from online sources. There enters zot2bib, which is a Zotero plugin that can inmediately copies new captured material to BibDesk’s database.