As I mentioned previously, I am writing my thesis using the LaTeX markup system, and thought I would put together a few words on my experience and things I have found. This includes formatting tables, including acronyms, and larger landscape figures/tables. I am sure there are many other ways to to achieve the same result, but these are the ones I have found to work.
LaTeX
And so the thesis writing begins
After nearly three years of research, I have started the long and arduous process of writing up. I am going to use LaTeX to compile my writing, mainly because it makes it easier to make beautiful looking documents. Also word processing packages have a nasty habit of corrupting the formatting, and make numbering of equations difficult.
In January I pulled together my notes and various bits of writing into a first semblance of a structure. I had started most of the writing in Word, but using the LibreOffice export plugin I have mentioned previously, I was able to convert this to basic LaTeX fairly easily. I have since added in plots from MATLAB, which I had been avoiding inserting into Word, as it doesn’t handle images in a sensible vector format (e.g. SVG, EPS, PDF).
Research tools
Whilst I have not been at this research malarkey very long, several people have made suggestions for useful software, in addition to my own past experience. I have put some notes/links below on various tools that should help towards the process of research. Hopefully this might be of interest to others, and feel free to add your suggestions below.