[ILUG] LaTeX training

[Andrew McCarthy]

On Thu, Nov 30, 2006 at 11:02:54AM +0000, Cian Davis wrote:
<snipped a little>
> Bear in mind that theses take over 6 months to write up.

This is something worth emphasising. In my experience, most of what you
structure, write and layout in the first three months will get binned,
or changed beyond recognition. Using LaTeX should help you to focus on
structure and text, and not tinker with layout. I really think people
don't realise how much time is wasted with dragging things around,
highlighting, changing fonts, etc.

If you can convince people to forget about the "look", and just go for
structure, they'll be half-way there. Once people have the very basics
like chapters, sections, subsections, (and maybe simple labels and
cross-references), they should be able to just get on with it. When
they're comfortable with that, you can give templates for figures and
bibliographies, but in the mean time just tell them to put "% insert
reference to paper x here" and *keep going*. Don't break your flow of
concentration. After you've written the text itself (the hard part, and
the reason you get the degree, remember), the brainless tedium of
inserting the rest will be almost welcome.

Andrew