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.