New Members ⇒ Hello

[padames]

I just joined to post a comment and decided to introduce myself.
I work as a researcher and developer of simulation software for flow of oil and gas through pipes in Calgary, Alberta.
I wrote my Master of Science thesis with LaTeX because I found out my traditional word processor could not be easily used to make effective cross references of the numerous equations I had in the document, even after I had bought additional software for writing the equations.
That was between 2008 and 2009.
Ever since then I have been using LaTeX daily for my research log and to write reports.
I got interested in Linux recently. Installed the latest Ubuntu and quickly found out that my favorite Windows LaTeX/TeX editors are not readily available there: TexnicCenter and TexWorks!
What would life be without its challenges, he?
I am currently learning how to use PSTricks to illustrate graphs. I have found the package easy to use and the results very professional.

Well thanks to everyone for keeping this forum open. I used it extensively to troubleshoot myself during the steep typesetting learning curve because that thesis document had to be written no matter what!

[frabjous]

Welcome to the board.

TeXworks is available for Ubuntu! There's both a regular package you can installed with "sudo apt-get install texworks", and a development PPA for fresher releases.

I think you might be able to run TeXnicCenter through Wine, though honestly, you're better checking out some of the Linux-specific IDEs like Kile, which I think are much better. Or take the plunge and try to master one of the classic Unix editors like vim or emacs, for which many LaTeX-related plugins are available.

For a review of 8 free LaTeX editors (all available on Ubuntu), look here.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi padames,

welcome to the board!

I'm using Ubuntu too. TeXworks is available for Ubuntu:

• It's part of TeX Live and may be installed with it
• there's a TeXworks package in the Ubuntu repositories (install with Synaptic or apt-get or ...)
• you could install current builds (dpkg -i texworks_x.y.z.deb)
• there's a binary made for an app launcher, I would have to look where it is if required.

I like TeXworks much. But for complex projects I'm using Kile on Ubuntu. It works fine. Installation is easy, some automatically installed KDE libs don't hurt.

Btw. TikZ is a powerful alternative to PSTricks. Have a look at the TikZ example gallery.

Stefan

[padames]

Thanks for the comments on LaTeX editors under Ubuntu. Very good timing.
I had narrowed down the alternatives to Emacs and Kile. I've managed to build Emacs already... but I was having second thoughts about Kile until the good comments in these two replies encouraged me to install it and give it a try.
For complex LaTeX projects in Windows I also prefer TeXnicCenter over TeXworks in spite of the excellent synchronized editor and previewer window approach of the latter (it has broken in projects with large number of input files though).
I like the flexibility of output profiles and all the customizable toolbars in TeXnicCenter.
I had never heard of TikZ but I will have a look into it as I need to do more visualization work.

[frabjous]

Just for the record, you can customize output profiles in TeXworks too. (Edit > Preferences > Typesetting tab.) You can customize toolbars too, I think, though this would be rather difficult and require some knowledge of the Qt toolkit.

If you want both a built-in integrated preview and a customizable toolbar, you might be interested in TeXmakerX, though Kile's interaction with Okular is probably just as good as having a built-in preview. (It supports SyncTeX forward/reverse searches, for example.)

[localghost]

We are looking forward to your contributions, may it be questions or answers.


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten