General ⇒ Migration of already written Material to LaTeX

[jesmond micallef]

Dear members,

I'm a new member and a beginner. I am doing my PhD thesis and my tutor told me to start doing the project with LaTeX. I am reading lots of stuff but I do not know how to begin!

I have five pages of written material and a bibliography. Would someone be so generous as to translate this for me in LaTeX and advice me how to proceed? I'm a missionary in Athens, Greece and no one is able to help me here. I have to do it by myself but it is getting desperate.


Thanks for your help
Fr Jesmond Micallef

[kaiserkarl13]

For a Ph.D. dissertation, you may want to see whether someone has developed a document class that formats said dissertation according to your graduate school's specifications. Some are pickier than others.

I would recommend any of the learning tools under the LaTeX for Beginners heading on this forum, in particular "The Not-So-Short Introduction to LaTeX."

In terms of translation, that's easy---paste the text into a text editor, add \textbf{...} to all boldface text and \emph{...} around all emphasized text. Chapters are made with \chapter, sections with \section, etc. TeX does the rest.

Bibliographies can be generated using BibTeX or possibly BibLaTeX, both of which are very good for handling bibliographies.

All of that said: if no one there can help you, and you don't know LaTeX at all, then perhaps "at the last minute" is not a good time to start learning!

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi Jesmond,

welcome to the board!

You are writing a PhD thesis, great! So you are intelligent and you would not have problems learning LaTeX. Of course, it requires some time and work. I think other people would not do this completely for you, at least not in their spare time - there are TeX consultancy services and other people who work for money. I just doubt somebody typesets your thesis in his spare time for free and you would get the shiny PhD with less work. Learning and working with writing tools is part of the scientific work. But learning LaTeX is a great experience if you really enter it.

For a fast start, you could by a book. For example, I wrote the LaTeX Beginner's Guide for a fast paced start with many hands-on examples. The ebook version is cheaper and currently available for 17.84 Euro. There are free guides available, it's just that a current book may be a better choice than "something found on the internet", though there are great guides. Free stuff is often made by fellow users in spare time, while books often are a result of many months or years of dedicated author's, reviewer's and editor's work and went through a process of concept approval, corrections, technical editing, proofreading, re-editing, finally a publisher backs it up. But save money, invest more time yourself. Here's a list of good introductions, tutorials, and further stuff, the link to what Karl mentioned: LaTeX Resources for Beginners.

If you would have questions (which aren't so basic that they are already answered by reading any introduction), or encounter any problems, feel free to post here. You are welcome and you will get help.

Good luck with your thesis!

Stefan

[jesmond micallef]

Thanks guys.

Stefan, I would like to by your book. I hope I will find it.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Just click the link (underlined) which I gave above, to find the book at the publisher's web site. Or click the book cover which you can see on the right. There you can read a sample chapter. So you can see if you would like the style before you buy.

You can also find it on amazon.com, which delivers to Greece too. Just type the name into the search box. Amazon should offer sample pages too. I just guess the publisher may offer if cheaper or even in bundle offers with other books, or as ebook.

It's still work and costs time to go through such a tutorial. I just hope it's kind of fun doing it this way and intended to provide the best information available and digestible for LaTeX beginners.

Stefan

[jesmond micallef]

Stefan,

I am trying to build a bibliography. I have this preamble.

Code: Select all

\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\usepackage[russian,greek,italian]{babel}

\begin{document}
  \nocite*

  \bibliographystyle{plain}
  \bibliography{Bibliografia}
\end{document}

However I do not know how to include books in it, that is names of books. So I think that I have to use the PDF. Put the preamble on a new PDF, click the green button, right?

[Stefan Kottwitz]

For a new, different question, please always open a new topic. Mixed topics and follow-up questions to older or even solved topics are less likely to be read, you can imagine. Don't expect help in a 12th post to a differently labeled topic.

Instead of using \bibliography you could do it manually like here.

Stefan

[jesmond micallef]

I am new to the Forum...trying to learn this also...just posted where you tole me to.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

just posted where you tole me to.

I did not. I said:

For a new, different question, please always open a new topic.

This did not mean to add your question to a topic which has been solved and closed over a year ago. I gave you this to see how you could do it manually, without having to learn BibTeX.

Now I see that you have more than 200 books to enter and to sort. So I guess you better learn BibTeX too, or biblatex. I have a section in my book about BibTeX, and the mentioned free introductions usually cover this topic too. Again something to read. But afterwards it's no problem to handle 200 references and to customize the style of all.

To learn more about how the forum works, have a look at the Board Rules and the information about avoidable mistakes. All of this is meant to support you in getting the best help. That's why also my recommendation, open new topics on your own.

Stefan

[offroad]

This is an excellent start:

http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/tex ... esisStyle/