Writing and Managing Thesis in LaTeX

Question

I'm in the process of thesis writing. I'm LaTeX newbie and have its limited knowledge and experience. I'm thinking to use LaTeX or LyX for my thesis. Which one is better for thesis write up? If I go with LaTeX then how can I use it more efficiently. In case of LaTeX I'd like to have separate .tex file for each chapter and each chapter will have its own bibliography. Then how can I combine all chapters and other issue would of cross references. I have to my Univ. template for thesis write up. I'd highly appreciate if someone provide me general guidelines to manage and write a long document like thesis in LaTeX.

Answer 1

The following code is derived from my template code (currently only in svn). My old template can be found on this site.

It shows how to organise chapters using include and includeonly. Also numbering of pages at the beginning, main part and appendix are set up. having a bib for each chapter can be set up using biblatex, which I have not tried yet.

...

\addbibresource{bib/BibtexDatabase}

\includeonly{
 content/Title,
 content/0-Abstract,
 content/0-Introduction,
 content/1-Theory,
 content/2-Experiments,
 content/3-Results,
 content/4-Discussion,
}

\listfiles

\begin{document}

% required for hyperref (not displayed)
\pagenumbering{alph}\setcounter{page}{1}%
\pagestyle{empty}

% -- title page --
\include{content/Title}
\cleardoublepage

% -- abstract --
\include{content/0-Abstract} 
\cleardoublepage

\frontmatter
\pagestyle{scrheadings}

% -- table of contents --
%
% add table of contents to pdf bookmarks
\pdfbookmark[1]{\contentsname}{toc}
\tableofcontents

% --- Main Document --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
\mainmatter
%
\include{content/0-Introduction}
\include{content/1-Theory}
\include{content/2-Experiments}
\include{content/3-Results}
\include{content/4-Discussion}

% -- bibliography --
% (must be placed _before_ appendix)
\printbibliography[%
  heading=bibintoc, % (bibintoc, bibnumbered)
]   

%% -- list of figures and tables --
\clearpage
\listoffigures
\listoftables

% --- Appendix --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
\appendix % switch to appendix mode
\include{content/Z-Appendix}

\end{document}

Answer 2

On the "Managing" side, I'd really recommend a version control system. git (and github) has treated me very well.

Answer 3

I have come to like package todonotes which helps a lot to remember all the small and big things you still have to to. LaTeX-savy reviewers can also use it.

Answer 4

You should check out Choosing Your Workflow Applications (also on GitHub) by Kieran Healy. It is targeted to social science grad students, but a lot of the information should be relevant.

Introduction for "Choosing Your Workflow Applications" :

As a beginning graduate student in the social sciences, what sort of software should you use to do your work? More importantly, what principles should guide your choices? This article offers some answers. The short version is: write using a good text editor (there are several to choose from); analyze quantitative data with R or Stata; minimize errors by storing your work in a simple format (plain text is best) and documenting it properly. Keep your projects in a version control system. Back everything up regularly and automatically. Don’t get bogged down by gadgets, utilities or other accoutrements: they are there to help you do your work, but often waste your time by tempting you to tweak, update and generally futz with them. To help you get started, I provide a short discussion of the Emacs Starter Kit for the Social Sciences, a drop-in set of useful defaults designed to help you get started using Emacs (a powerful, free text-editor) for data analysis and writing.

Answer 5

I have recently started learning latex to write my thesis. I can recommened two great books for reference.

1) Latex for Beginner's by Stefan Kottwitz (This book is awesome and there is a section on handling large documents - having chapters in different files.)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/LaTeX-Beginner%2527s-Guide-Stefan-Kottwitz/dp/1847199860/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1317044296&sr=8-1

2)Latex Wikibook

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX

A friend told me when starting:

a) Don't use a template. They are very tempting but you can do it all yourself and learn how latex works much better along the way. I tried to use some templates but they were more confusing than just starting from scratch with the book class.

b) Use biblatex and biber. You want a bibliography at the end of each section and biblatex can do it without any extra packages plus the documentation is good.

c)Running "texdoc " is your friend! (on windows to get package documentation)

As for the editor, I use texworks as it is simple and comes with TexLive 2011. Again, LyX was tempting.

Good luck!