

- #Aquamacs auctex how to#
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In graduate school in Stony Brook, TeX '82 (as the new version was called then) was available and this is what I used to typeset letters, notes, papers, thesis. That version does not compile any longer, but at some point I converted it to LaTeX. I was converted immediately and wrote my 1984 undergraduate thesis using TeX. I asked around and found out that they had been produced using TeX (which at the time was TeX '78) and which was installed on only a handful of computers at MIT at the time. Both were very limited in their ability to typeset mathematical content - although I recall writing an essay on group theory using Scribe.ĭuring my time working as an undergraduate research assistant at the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, I saw people producing beautifully typeset preprints with lots of mathematical formulae. I had been using something called Scribe in order to write essays and also played around with troff. I was an undergraduate at MIT in the early 1980s and used TeX ('78) for the first time to write my undergraduate thesis in Physics. Word's popularity is explained by my "Doughnut Theory" : If all you've ever eaten are doughnuts, you can tell a good doughnut from a bad doughnut, but you have no idea what good food is. I'm still having trouble absorbing that Joseph wrote his thesis in Word.

I gave up on Word and now only use when forced to, which is rare.
#Aquamacs auctex how to#
I was always asking others how to undo something Word was just sure that I wanted to do but didn't.
#Aquamacs auctex windows#
I found it too anti-intuitive, too ugly (I hate ragged-right justification for example), dangerous (lost docs on a semi-regular schedule due to Windows semi-regular crashing), and the learning curve was just too high (way higher than LaTeX, imo). For me the decision was the reverse: should I go with Word and dump LaTeX? At my first job everyone was using Word so I tried it. I was never faced with the decision to choose LaTeX over Word. So I was bred on the beauty of LaTeX and thought that was normal. It's automatic capitalization features drives me nuts.

It's always doing things that I don't want and then I have to spend time figuring out how to undo it. It was over 5 years before I ever used any MS software, and I've never used it to any great degree since. The first OS I ever used was unix, my first year of university, and was told immediately to learn emacs and that all lab reports for a class I was in had to be done in LaTeX. tex template that resembled the one we had in.
#Aquamacs auctex plus#
That's how it started.Īs for a personal LaTeX pride - my master thesis is prepared with LaTeX, and I used quite a lot of functionality outside basic LaTeX - subfigures, listings, ams packages, page margins, headers and footers, BibTeX, customized hyperref, plus more. And then he explained some of the basic stuff, and gave me a book to read. To my jaw-dropped mug he said "Oh, it's just LaTeX". So, just a few days before I finished the thesis, I went to complain about my miserable existence to my math go-to guy, and he showed me one of the exams he prepared for his students - he was doing some black magic in vi in a terminal, and he had some Makefiles for additional stuff like automatic generation of the problems and the solutions, uploading them automatically to the server, and preparing a sheet with names of all students in which the results are to be published later.
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My nerves were seriously shaken and I didn't want to get through the painful manual formatting again.

#Aquamacs auctex code#
Don't even get me started on references - I had to manually format them all (30+ entries), and that Gargantuan effort took probably a better part of a workday.įortunately, I had a good equation editor (not the Microsoft-supplied excuse of a such), and that made writing equations a breeze.Ĭode formatting and pretty-printing was another thing I struggled with - I ended up taking screenshots of the Matlab code from the editor, and adding those in the appendix. Even the slightest change in the text moved all the stuff around, and I had to double check almost all of the figures again and again. Word has automatic TOC creation and formatting, but there are occasions that you want to make it just right - for example, trimming a bit a long section title to fit on one row (which in LaTeX is trivial).Īs far as figures went, it worked mostly okay, unless you try to keep a figure on a specific page and manually try to adjust it to fit. It's not that I was new to Word, or that I can't find my way around a computer program, but it frustrated me to no end. I've written my bachelor thesis in Microsoft Word (version 2003, if memory serves), and that was excruciatingly painful experience.
