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Latex How To

One may notice my progression from using Microsoft's extremely horrible software to Latex and OpenOffice. I strongly urge you to switch over and be free of expensive, horrible software. Unless it came with your computer, with the price of gas ($1.399/L as of today), you should be wanting to save every penny you can. Also, not only do you save $$$, but also time since LaTeX does all your formatting for you whereas in Word, you have to worry about position, where the title should go, how big should the font be, what was the format of the bibliography again, this, that, etc...

Anyways, back to the point. I saw that many people didn't like LaTeX because it seems intimidating at first. What to compile, wait a minute, why would I compile a document...huh? So, I decided to make a generic LaTeX template package for those in need. There is a nice makefile for compilation included. Just check the README to get started. It gives an example of the article template, since that one is the most used I find.

You can download it here.

Here is a TeX reference card provided by a good friend Kacper but it is somewhat old. The commands should work but if they don't, much better to try Google!

svg2eps converter python script

SVG images are usually generated from BoUML, Dia or any tool for that matter. The great thing about SVG is that you can use Inkscape for editting. The problem lies in the fact that LaTeX wants some nice EPS files to include. There are ways to include SVG but they are cumbersome, and besides, EPS is vector graphics as well, so there is no loss of information. Anyways, this script will use inkscape and convert SVG to EPS. It is nice in that you can give it one or many files to convert and you have control over the destination as well. Just type svg2eps -h for help. Note: probably Linux friendly only since windows will require full path to inkscape executable, etc...Sorry!

MSDL thesis template

Here is a LaTeX MSDL thesis template. It is bare and you just need to change a few things (author, title, date, etc...) and your content. There is a nice README, examples of including images, definition boxes, citing references, making complex tables, etc... Enjoy! Currently, there is no example of generating an index, but the package is included. I will add it as soon as I actually do it myself!!!

Note that all of Hans' preferences are included for you. Also note that Hans uses an abbrev.bib file which contains abbreviations for frequently used bibliography items. I don't actually use it so you will need to get it from him or from the AToM3 package below, in the Thesis.tgz archive under the Thesis/lib folder, in case you want to use it. I didn't need it because I was using JabRef to get complete, non-abbreviated BibTeX sources.

UPDATE: This template was autogenerated using AToM3. Read below for more details on how to use it!

AToM3 MSDL thesis modeling environment

Most MSDLers have a mind map, here is mine. This was great in helping put ideas together...but it wasn't enough for me. I wanted something very similar but that would generate LaTeX for me as well (and not just a template in LaTeX). So I created a Thesis Meta-Model in our very own tool, AToM3. Talk about DSM (domain-specific modelling)...for your thesis! Click generate and on Linux, even view your PDF! The great thing with this is that all your thesis content is in a single file, the model file. When you click generate, it will get put into separate files, but who cares about that. You just want the final PDF. Moreover, you never have to worry about what to include where, everything is automagically done for you. Just run make!

This was part of a talk that I was supposed to give about MSDL and the power of the tools that we use. In particular, I wanted to show how fast and easy it was to make your own modelling environment, just from a class diagram. Then I wanted to show how fast and easy it was to manipulate a given model and do something interesting with it. This entire project took me about 5.5 hours, from start to finish. Consider that amazing if I wanted to build a tool from scratch and had to employ X number of software and design folk.

The outcome is a DSM environment, so it constrains you to your task at hand. It is a mix of visual and textual modeling, where the visual part describes the structure of the thesis and the textual part describes the content (in LaTeX). With a click of a button, your thesis will be generated in LaTeX and voila! If you are on Linux, it will even run make and display the PDF/PS/DVI for you. There is a very nice Help file, so open AToM3, load the meta-model and click on Help.

Steps to follow:
1. If you don't already have the new class diagram formalism with the CDV3* types, get it here and unpack it under ATOM3/Formalisms/ (make sure to archive any old class diagram formalisms otherwise AToM3 will complain).
2. Get ATOM3Text.py and put in under ATOM3/Kernel/ATOM3Types/ (this is the bug fixed version, if you don't use this, you will lose all thesis work over 50 lines).
3. Get Thesis.tgz and unpack it under ATOM3/Formalisms/

If you also download the above MSDL template, there is an example thesis model to get you started. If you click on the LaTeX/PDF button, it will give you some warnings (you can choose not to show them via the Edit menu) and finally ask you where to generate the thesis. Choose the msdlThesisTemplate directory that you just decompressed (because the included images and what not are in that directory) and voila. Be sure to check out the Edit menu and change any items you want to change (for example, I use evince as my document viewer, you can change it to what you like so your makefile is properly generated.

ENJOY!

Maintained by Reehan Shaikh. Last Modified: 2009/06/14 05:01:22.