Wow, that looks very nice!
I hope you do not feel I am stealing your thread now (I do not mean
to). I did also finish my thesis (in mathematics) recently, written
"in ConTeXt". For this I had a lot of help with your doc "Using
\startalign and friends", thank you.
The thesis is available at
http://www.math.chalmers.se/~mickep/mp-thesis-final.pdf
and a short presentation of the third paper
http://www.math.chalmers.se/~mickep/pres.pdf
Some comments:
* At our university the thesis should be printed on the (not really
standard) G5 paper. No problem in defining and using it with ConTeXt.
* The bibliography uses Taco's module. I am happy of being able to
have different bibliographies in one file.
* As a mathematician I was a bit tired of the computer modern fonts (I
really like them, but I see them to often), so I decided to go with
the utopia/fourier fonts. This forced me to work with mkii, since I
did not get these fonts to work with mkiv (This is still a problem, I
am not sure how to go on with it for future documents).
* Typesetting math worked very smoothly. There is one place where I
hade to add some negative vertical space (I could not reproduce this
in a minimal file).
* I'm very happy with the way MetaPost and ConTeXt work together.
* The presentation is inspired by Thomas A. Schmitz' files at
http://www.tug.org/pracjourn/2006-2/schmitz/ (thanks!)
* The presentation uses Wolfram's Mathematica fonts which I find being
very clear.
I will happily continue to use ConTeXt in future projects.
/Micke P
On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 6:35 PM, Aditya Mahajan
Hi everyone,
I finished my thesis, writing both my thesis and my presentation using ConTeXt.
Thesis: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~adityam/publications/thesis/thesis.pdf
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").
* 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).
* 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.
* 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.
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.
* 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.
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.
Aditya ___________________________________________________________________________________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!
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