I'm finishing up grad school. I write all of my papers in vi (usually Elvis, sometimes Vim) and mark them up with LaTeX. Yeah, I know. I'm a geek. I just love the beautiful look of a typeset document when I'm done. I like the way it forces me to think about the outline; creating \sections{}, then \subsection{} and even \subsubsection{}. This looks really nice as an auto-generated table of contents.
Even better than the beautiful typesetting, I really enjoy keeping my bibliography in BibTeX and having LaTeX/BibTeX automagically write my bibliography citations and print my bibliography at the end by simply writing \cite[p.78]{author}.
And when I'm done, if I don't want a PDF, I can use latex2rtf for an RTF or latex2html to create a web site (or latex2man if I'm feeling extra geeky). And, I pretty much live in vi all day so, even if I try to use a regular word processor, it gets krufted up with :wq and randomly interjected i's and a's and x', etc.
I used to use emacs. I did more with emacs I think because I had a Wyse60 monitor and really used the multiple buffers and split screens. And, loved the macros. I know, you can do this with vi too. I really need to learn more of that in vi. Lately, while writing these papers, I find myself wanting to copy lines from other .tex docs into the current document. Cutting and pasting outside of vi leaves unexpected broken lines that require a lot of Ctrl-J, x, etc. Then I saw an article by Jun Wu "Perl as a command line tool" Lots of fun. Love Perl one-liners. She had a version of this example:
$ perl -ne 'print if $. >=64 && $. <=94' June10.tex >>../FinalPaper/ENG609final.tex
It's so great to NOT have to clean up line breaks after cut & paste. And, even better, it gives me an excuse to play around with Perl one-liners. Some people things that's odd but I see it as recreational - like Soduko or something.
Anyways, that's all I'm up to with Perl lately. See you all at the 20th anniversary of YAPC.
Showing posts with label BibTeX. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BibTeX. Show all posts
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