Comments on: Tools for the savvy grad student

By: Nate R

Nate R — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 15:20:40 +0000

The TikZ examples are great; often when I can’t figure out how to do something I come across an example of somebody doing _exactly that thing_ as part of one of the examples.

By: Diwaker Gupta

Diwaker Gupta — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 18:43:29 +0000

Yep, TikZ is a great companion for Beamer as well. Those guys sure do know how to write comprehensive documentation! But you’ve snuck in an even better resource Nate — http://www.texample.net!! Kind of low of content right now, but a fantastic idea!

By: Nate R

Nate R — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 18:25:42 +0000

I would add TikZ (http://www.texample.net/tikz/) to this list for any figure drawing. It is a large, complex package (the manual is over 700 pages long!) but once you get the hang of it you can create complex figures right inside of your tex document. You get all of the power of latex in a figure markup environment, meaning for example that the appropriate fonts will be used when you’re inserting $math mode markup$ in a figure (never again will your PDF come back from the publisher because R outputs PDFs w/ missing fonts!).

By: Diwaker Gupta

Diwaker Gupta — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 22:55:37 +0000

Thanks. Yes, one of these days I’ll do an update. No longer being a grad student also means having lesser time to attend to the blog :(

By: Ionut

Ionut — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 09:05:36 +0000

in this case maybe would be useful to post an updated software list, which software you use, your workflow, …. Nice blog.

By: Diwaker Gupta

Diwaker Gupta — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 17:14:14 +0000

Glad you found this useful. For version control, I highly recommend you use Git — bzr and mercurial don’t even come close. I’ve used R in the past; its nice. I’m not sure how you are using MySQL for math?

For presentations, I used LaTeX Beamer for a while (I blogged about it http://floatingsun.net/2006/05/15/tools-i-use-beamer/). Later in my grad school days I gave in and used OpenOffice and MS Powerpoint. These days I just use Google Docs where possible — as long as you don’t need fancy animations, it should work just fine.

By: matt

matt — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 01:55:23 +0000

great post! i took much the same journey.

i use emacs because there’s a module for it (auctex). i found crosstex too late for my thesis, but i use it and citeulike for my manuscripts now. i made the mistake of using svn. but i want to learn mercurial.

on the math side, i use PyXPlot, R, and mysql. give those a try if you haven’t.

also, you didn’t mention powerpoint presentations/posters which you probably will end up doing a lot. give pstricks and powerdot a go.

By: Diwaker Gupta

Diwaker Gupta — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 16:42:39 +0000

I’ve used Inkscape and Dia in the past.

By: Aanjhan Ranganathan

Aanjhan Ranganathan — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 18:17:29 +0000

Learnt Inkscape with some help from friends. I don’t think I will ever look back. HAving a diagram to draw and learning a tool helps a lot. I have got my workflow in place I guess.

By: Aanjhan Ranganathan

Aanjhan Ranganathan — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 12:51:03 +0000

What do you use to draw figures? Like block diagrams and stuff?
OoDraw works but converting to pdf or eps is plain sucky. Do you have any work flow for diagrams. Like from drawing it to \includegraphics :-) Will be helpful.
xfig is SO oldschool and Inkscape seems overwhelming for me.