FAQ
overflow

QUESTION

I'm starting a PhD and am being overwhelmed with the different possible ways people do things, and how they very rarely mix.

I'm (obviously) sold on TeXing it, and have a ViM background I intend on continuing, and am using Mendeley for article tracking.

Can anyone suggest/recommend a 'system' guide for managing a thesis-size work in TeX including citing/referencing/bibliography, images and charts etc?

Another nice aid would be a way of integrating a project diary in the same system, but I'm open to experienced ideas about that.

I used TeX for my MEng thesis but I'll admit that at the end it was barely holding together with the equivalent of duct-tape and love, would like to start off this with a bit more contributed-wisdom.

Either way, unless the guide you recommend has already done an exemplary job, I plan on writing up my own 'guide' to hopefully help someone else down the line.

ANSWER

• Universities normally have poorly written guides and badly designed template requirements. Most of these are remnants of solutions to problems caused by typewriters. If your University does not have one and you are free to use your own style consider yourself lucky.

  Start fresh from a good base class. book, memoir or Koma and modify as you need.

• Use a version control such as Github early.

• Write clean tex files. See, for example Will Robertson's Github page, which I recommend you use as a guide. You can also find a lot of information here at tex.sx (e.g., see Writing and managing thesis in LaTeX).

• Last but not the least, start typing your thesis immediately. When I wrote mine I had two extra files, one called journal.tex and another todo.tex, but that was a long way ago and there are better ways for this sort of thing now. Currently at work I use a localhost with a wordpress installation for these. I also use Jabref for managing references.

As my late professor used to say "... anyone that writes a thesis using LaTeX deserves a PhD for this alone", good luck!

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