During the last couple of weeks, I've been busy working on my B.Sc. thesis in economics. After some initial hesitation I wrote the thesis using a text only Debian system on my iBook. I first planned to write the thesis using Google Docs which I could have used in the several locations I divided my time during the working week.
After some experimentation with Google Docs I finally took the bull by the horns and decided to write the paper using the tools installed in my Debian laptop. For writing the paper, I used Emacs with AUCTeX using the longlines-mode. I typeset it using LaTeX and KOMA script. Unfortunately, I still have some problems with the bibliography style defined by my school. I just can't figure out e.g. how to remove the full stop after year in the bibliography provided by chicago.bst.
I just hope I'll get the bibliography style fixed as soon as possible. If I succeed in hacking the .bst file there will be no reason not to write my M.Sc. thesis with this combination of very stable software. Of course, there remains the possibility of exporting the paper to rtf, format it with the official Word style provided by the school and format the bibliography by hand.
But being so close to finishing the thesis I would rather not cheat like that...
3 comments:
Heh! Major GeekPoints to you... :)
(A college friend used vim to format the tables in his wife's dissertation.)
--GG
Assuming you are using bibtex, and cannot figure out how to adapt the chicago.bst file to remove the full stop after the year (bst files are indeed difficult to read but you could try changing the "mid.sentence" declaration in the output.year.check function to be "after.sentence" and see if that works for you), you can always generate the .bbl file and then insert it manually into your .tex file (removing the bibliography and bibliographystyle lines). Do this after you have completely finished your thesis and are ready to print (or email) the final version.
I hope this helps!
Thank you Eric!
I emailed the final version yesterday, but this might help me with my master's thesis next year.
Most of my problems were solved by econ.bst that was pretty easy to translate into Finnish. Of course, being able to solve a problem gave me some other issues to solve.
Biblatex should be easier to hack than bibtex. I have to consider moving from bibtex to biblatex for the next paper :-)
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