Aditya Mahajan wrote:
Hi everyone,
I finished my thesis, writing both my thesis and my presentation using ConTeXt.
congratulations!
Thesis: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~adityam/publications/thesis/thesis.pdf
impressive and it also looks nice (the large interline spacing even looks ok -)
Source: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~adityam/publications/thesis/thesis.tar.gz
Presentation: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~adityam/publications/thesis/thesis-presentation.p...
Overall it was a pleasant experience, but there were some difficulties. I am summarizing my experience here. Hopefully, others will find it useful.
* Layout and Formatting: It was extremely simple to set up the layout and formatting according to the thesis specifications. Due to the ease of changing formatting, I experimented quite a bit with the formatting before settling down to what is in the thesis (The school wanted "nothing fancy").
at least they gave you the freedom to play with fonts
* Organizing large projects: The product-component structure made it easy to work on single chapters. However, I could not get correct numbering for the components (If I compiled chapter-02, it got numbered 1). In the end, I was just compiling the whole thesis at the time, since it was pretty fast (~10 sec).
there is a \setuphead[chapter][file=..] option which should do the job (remin dme to implement that in the upcoming mkiv sectioning mechanisms as well)
* Fonts: Using different fonts with MKIV was really easy. For the presentation, I did have some trouble in getting Euler to work with the minimals. Hopefully, this will be corrected soon.
indeed; anyhow, your thesis proofs that luatex can be used for real production
* Math: The math alignments worked very nicely, but I had to do a lot of manual tweaking at a lot of places. Also, equations seem to like to have a tendency of starting on a new page. I tried changing penalties for predisplay and postdisplay (which are set to zero), but it invariably led to bad page breaks at other places.
At some places, the equation overlapped with the previous material. I am not sure what was causing this (medium interline spacing, wrong calculation of the width of the previous line, or something else). In the end, I simply put a few manual \break[small] here and there.
in mkiv we can redo the before/after math spacing because there we have the control that we wanted
Being able to write unicode math made simplified reading math markup.
* Metapost: TeX-MP interaction is fast and easy. However, debugging metapost errors is difficult because context does not stop compiling on encountering a metapost error.
ok, remind me to implement a 'show error when mp fails' mechanism (we may need a way to trigger tex's error mode then from within luatex then; somethin gis possible now but a bit hackery)
* Bibliography. For a large part, the bib module was very easy. In the end, there were a few glitches with the formatting of the bibliography (too title space between entries) which I had to manually correct. (Look for \help inside the bbl file).
The bbl file sorted authors with multiple entries incorrectly. If I had authors with four publications in a year, say 2000, the came out as 2000d, 2000c, 2000b, 2000a. I wanted 2000a, 2000b, 2000c, and 2000d, so in the end I just edited the bbl file by hand.
There was also problem with maybe year. If I had 2000a and 2000b in the bib file, but only referred to 2000b in the thesis, the year came out as 2000b rather than 2000. For this also, I edited the bbl file by hand.
i like the bibliography layout
Overall, ConTeXt made writing the thesis fairly easy. I mean the typesetting part of it. For those who are wondering, ConTeXt does not help with the content of the thesis :-) I would like to thank Hans and Taco for providing ConTeXt and everyone on the mailing list for answering my various questions.
Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------