Microsoft word is such a common word editing software that no student is untouched from it. Even I am using it happily since last 10 years. My every report, document, sheets etc were written using microsoft office.
Gradually, after enrolling in doctrate, I realize that it is quiet a difficult part to write the publications in word. All the formatting part was quiet frustating. I was spending more of my time in formatting text, images, tables, margins graphs etc.rather then the technical content of the paper. Since I was using Ubuntu, my problem became worse (to convert .odt to .doc and then loose all the fine details of original doc ).
Learning a new tool is not so easy and when I learn fro internet that LATEX is a markup language, I was a bit afraid of learning it. But, again I face the same problem of formatting agai and again in word. The solution to my problem was - LATEX!!
After 4-5 days of learning and little bit of learning i realize that this editing tool is a gem of documenting tools. If one wants to write a paper, technical report etc, he should be aware of latex. It might take a time (somewhere around 15 days, 2-3 hrs daily), but after that one can completely focus on his studying, experimenting etc.
Few softwares which I found useful during writing my publications are:
- Latex
2.GNUplot - for making graphs
3.inkscape - for formatting images (.eps, .pdf)
4.ngspice (for running my experiments)
The commandfor installing the above tools on ubuntu are as follows:
- Commands for installing LATEX on ubuntu (mine was 12.04)
sudo apt-get install texlive-base biblatex(enter) sudo apt-get install texlive-fonts-recommended(enter)
There are few more packages of LATEX that canbe installed, but I had install only the above one uptil now.
- Command for installing gnuplot
$ sudo apt-get install gnuplot(enter)
- Commad for installing inkscape:
sudo apt-get update (enter) sudo apt-get install inkscape (enter)
-command for installing ngspice:
This is a seperate topic on this site. Please have a look to the topic for any help…