Brian Kerr

Or: how to get a stupid master's degree without using Microsoft Word.

Get TeX and LaTeX

MacPorts (formerly DarwinPorts) has a distribution of TeTex 3.0 in package tetex. The informational URL for this package is currently broken due to the MacPorts migration, but may work in the future.

i-installer also claims to have packages for TeX and friends, but I’d recommend MacPorts since you will additional ports from their collection anyways.

Get BibDesk

BibDesk is a gorgeous bibliography manager. It uses BibTeX as its underlying store, but can also organize your PDFs and URLs in an iTunes-style interface and filesystem abstraction. I use a single, sprawling bibliography for everything, breaking BibTeX style and allowing the full iTunes-flavored experience.

You can use keywords, groups, and custom filters to organize references.

BibDesk also has several handy input paths — you can import BibTeX references from the clipboard or from files, and there is a very cool “New Publication from Web” features, accessed with ⌘L inside BibTeX or from your Services menu elsewhere, that lets you quickly structure a text or HTML citation into BibTeX.

I can’t recommend BibDesk highly enough.

Get an editor

LaTeX has a sufficiently noisy syntax that you’ll want some help.

If you are writing in emacs or vim, you’re all set.

If you want a GUI (which I do), there are a few options:

• TeXShop (free, GPL’d) is a dorky-looking, standalone TeX previewer with a very lightweight editor built-in;
• Textmate (commercial, worth the money) is a superb general-purpose text editor with LaTeX support via its built-in LaTeX bundle; essentially, you hit ⌘B to get a PDF of your document, and ⌘{ and ⌘} to wrap environments and commands, respectively, from the current word (long story short, this eliminates most of the gross typing TeX requires);
• Textwrangler (freeware) is the watered-down, freebie version of BBEdit; it has TeX syntax highlighting, and probably other forms of editing assistance.

I think Textmate is the best; your mileage may vary.

Finally, get LyX

After some amount of time (for me, it took about 15 minutes), you’ll get tired of writing TeX, and even more tired of trying to read what you just wrote.

That’s when you need to get LyX. At this writing, OS X binaries are found here, but check the LyX pages to make sure you have the most recent version.

Here’s how LyX defines itself, from §1.1 of its documentation:

LyX is a document preparation system. It excels at letting you create complex technical and scientific articles with mathematics, cross-references, bibliographies, indices, etc. It is very good at documents of any length in which the usual processing abilities are required: automatic sectioning and pagination, spellchecking, and so forth. It can also be used to write a letter to your mom, though granted, there are probably simpler programs available for that.

It’s a structured document editor that really, honestly, truly allows you to have your cake and eat it too. You get the nice affordances of spell-check, decent-looking draft fonts and formatting, bibliography integration, and everything else a word processor could optimally provide. You can also do anything TeX can do, since that’s what it is — underneath a layer or two of well-documented abstraction. There’s a really great formula editor. And, if you are tired of figuring out how LyX handles your favorite TeX concept, or want to do something it can’t, just insert some ERT (Evil Red Text) — LyX-speak for inline LaTeX ‘patches’ to your document. I could mention more features of LyX, like its version-control integration, or powerful templating, but that would probably be overkill.

Needless to say, LyX is an essential application for my work. (And I mean actual work, not just school junk.) It’s a little bit of a weird-looking app on OS X, but that’s my fault for using a closed operating system, and not a slight against LyX at all.

Thanks!

As always, thanks to everybody whose hard work has gone into this massive toolchain of excellent free software.