Weil jetzt unbedingt ein paar sinnlose Beiträge in kurzer Folge nötig sind, um die Auswüchse meiner LaTeX-Obsession zu konterkarieren: wordsmith - the place to go for anagrams.
Nerdtechnisch gesehen ein sanfter Übergang.

Tanja Jenni gibt ja eher wenig her, und Ninja an Jet (grammatikalisch falsch, tendentiell terrorismusverdächtig) ist immer noch besser als Jean at Jinn (beklemmendes Beziehungsdrama, nouvelle vague, Frankreich 1961) aber manche Namen sind einfach prädestiniert dafür.

I did it! I did it! I did it! Or - to put it in words more accurately describing the process: I, with the patient help of quite a few real and virtual persons did it.
Here is the preamble (and some text) of my very own customized LaTeX paper-template - following the citation guidelines of the bloody Wr. Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte. It looks positively cute. And it took me more than a week to finish. It's not very complex, which hautingly shows what a total computer-looser I am. I honestly downloaded and installed every single LaTeX-package (programs? implementations? things that help you - for example - to define your page-layout) by myself in my wonderful TDS-conform directory tree before someone told me that every good LaTeX-distribution already got them. How could I possibly know if they don't show up on my HD?
So ... I guess that's the point where even readers with the best of intentions loose any spark of interest.



Better now?
I know how futile it is to be an advocate for LaTeX (die, Word!) because I'm nearly the last one who is still not done with her thesis and using it in the humanities for articles/books seems not the best of ideas - no journal/publisher is going to accept it (we're kind of a dark and negative universe to hard sciences' fluffy realm of LaTeX love).
So if I can't campaign for LaTeX I can campaign for the use of a bibliographic reference manager* working with Word (that doesn't feel nearly as cool - it's like campaigning for John Edwards even though you're a member of the Socialist Party USA).

It

• fetches the literature from online sources (libraries) -
  I knew there was a way superior to copy and pasting the catalogue entry
• arranges it via keywords, (smart)folders and every other possible entry-field
• and in Word you can simply cite via a shortkey assigned to every publication (e.g. durkh1897). The tedious rest - Have I cited it before? Can I use the shorttitle now? Ebd., vgl. Anm. X) is taken care of (or so I hope, if it works anything like the LaTeX/BibTeX interaction does).

Here - PStiepolo2 (pdf, 388 KB) - is the PDF of a PS-paper I wrote during my 3rd semester (of art history, duh) - reworked with LaTeX. I think it looks nearly as gorgeous as the raw-file. Ignore the first page, I just experimented with colour. And I use InDesign for my first pages anyway - you can't totally disguise were you came from.


*Something the likes of Endnote or BibWord, just free.

p.s.: I just read that some PDF-viewers could display some fonts somewhat raggedly - there is a fix for that, but I'm too tired now to try. If I have to consult one more manual or FAQ I'll go crazy for sure. I'm using Skim (a Mac app) as my default PDF reader (and have no problems at all). Download it, it's a good one.

I loath Word. Every time I have to open it (when I'm proofreading one of my mothers texts for example) a perfidious feeling of oppressed rage creeps into my toes. For me, Word oozes with malice. Application-wise it's the only thing able to induce such epic feelings of discontent. It's quite irrational. Of course there is some justification since it was painstrikingly slow on my old computer (during the 10 percent of times when it didn't crash entirely). I assume the whole crashing-thing wasn't Words fault, but mine for attempting to bring two entities together that were obviously not ready to collaborate.

The last few months I used TextMate for every bit I wrote - and if you ever have to clean up 100+ pages of multiple bibliographies - this one does just fine. It has a great search function where all the results from different documents are actually shown in context. Of course it is quick, but it better be, because there is nothing more to see than plain text. behold:


click to enlarge

For someone who slowly made her peace with an ahem simple user interface LaTeX was the logical next step. It works very gracefully (at least it seems so to me, who has no prior knowledge* about the arcane workings of ... macros) and the endresult - the paper/article whatever - has some understated dignity. (Of course one could say the formulas look dapper, but the humanities need incentives too).
So if you can part with the WYSIWYG principle as shown here - try it!

And I'm sure this one will come in handy someday:




* Naturally I had a macro to kill off the fire creature down in the mines - I was only a marginally talented elf, what else could I do? - but I didn't write it myself. Cheater.

Have you ever enslaved a population?
Have you ever killed the wrong person?
Have you ever been a professional critic?
Have you ever made a planet, or nation, radioactive?
Have you ever engaged in piracy?*
Have you ever disfigured a beautiful thing?
Have you ever been a professional executioner?
Have you given robots a bad name?**
Have you ever set a booby trap?
Have you systematically set up mysteries? ***
Have you ever sought to persuade someone of your insanity?
Have you ever deserted, or betrayed, a great leader?
Have you ever smothered a baby?
Do you deserve to be enslaved?
Have you ever debased a nation's currency?****
Is there any question on this list I had better not ask you again?*****